Julian March - The Area's Ethnic and Linguistic Structure

The Area's Ethnic and Linguistic Structure

Two major ethnic and linguistic clusters aimed to be forcibly unified in the region, the western parts inhabited predominantly by an Italian population, with Italian, Venetian and Friulian as the three major languages, and a small Istriot minority, on one hand, and the eastern and northern areas were inhabited by South Slavs, namely Slovenes and Croats, with small Montenegrian (Peroj) and Serb minorities, on the other hand.

Other ethnic groups included Istro-Romanians in eastern Istria, Carinthian Germans in the Canale Valley, as well as smaller German and Hungarian speaking communities in some larger urban centres, mostly members of former Austro-Hungarian élites.

According to the Austrian census of 1910/1911, the whole Austrian Littoral, annexed to Italy after 1920/1924, counted 978,385 people. 421,444 or 43,1% declared Italian as their language of daily conversation (Umgangsprache), while 327,230 or 33,4% spoke Slovene, and 152,500 or 15,6% and spoke Croatian. In addition, there were around 30,000 German speakers (3,1% of the overall population), around 3,000 Hungarian speakers (0,3%), and smaller clusters of Istro-Romanian and Czech speakers.

The Friulian, Venetian and Istriot languages were counted as Italian. According to estimates, at least 60,000 or around 14% of those listed as Italians were in fact Friulian speakers, frequently with a pronounced separate ethnic identity.

Read more about this topic:  Julian March

Famous quotes containing the words area, ethnic, linguistic and/or structure:

    Whatever an artist’s personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.
    Willem De Kooning (b. 1904)

    Motherhood is the second oldest profession in the world. It never questions age, height, religious preference, health, political affiliation, citizenship, morality, ethnic background, marital status, economic level, convenience, or previous experience.
    Erma Bombeck (20th century)

    The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the ‘creativity of language,’ that is, the speaker’s ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are ‘familiar.’
    Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)

    If rightly made, a boat would be a sort of amphibious animal, a creature of two elements, related by one half its structure to some swift and shapely fish, and by the other to some strong-winged and graceful bird.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)