Linguistic Enclaves and Enclave Communities In the Mediterranean

A linguistic enclave is a restricted linguistic area where an X-speaking community is surrounded by a Y-speaking society. This article reviews some cases of Mediterranean enclave speech communities, while specific concern is devoted to Alghero (l’Alguer), a Catalan-speaking enclave in Sardinia, in the western Mediterranean.  Often the linguistic landscape of enclaves involves the intertwining of language diversity and multilingual contact from which several sociolinguistic phenomena arise, since the emergence of a diverse language repertoire is a common outcome. I emphasize family and societal multilingualism, local identities and ideologies, and local language regression and progression. Diversity embraces not only language, but culture and religions too. These features make language enclaves appropriate sites to study the historical dynamics of languages and peoples. Most of the communities considered are under cultural and political pressure and their patrimonial language is subject to functional restriction, language shift and/or language obsolescence and death. However, they are, first and foremost, examples of long-lasting language maintenance under challenging conditions. Their origins typically stem from historical migrations and further settlement. Not all enclave communities are permanently settled: the Rom have been traditionally a nomadic people. I consider the case of Catalan Gypsies in France. They moved from the Catalan countries and their ethnic language is a variety of Catalan. Top-down and bottom-up revitalization measures in the Catalan-speaking community of Alghero are also considered with respect to both corpus planning and status planning.