'Veneto out of Italy? Dialect, Migration, and Transnational Identity'

In recent years, new efforts have been made to revitalize and promote local dialects in northern Italy. This project of dialect promotion has occurred side by side with new political restrictions on illegal immigrants in Italy, and both projects-dialect revitalization and anti-immigrant legislation-have been led by the influential federalist political party called Lega Nord. This revitalization is part of a larger set of political initiatives launched by two main political parties in Veneto, Liga Veneta, a subdivision of the Lega Nord, and the new, independently born Veneto Stato. Using a variety of discourse data collected in the Veneto region, this article shows how the promotion of Veneto dialect is intimately related to Veneto speakers' defense against migrants and the Italian state. This link between local linguistic revitalization and anti-immigration efforts is not just a case of 'regionalization' within the Italian state, however. On the one hand, Veneto speakers emphasize their regional belonging rather than their national one by promoting dialect over Standard Italian; on the other hand, they construct a transnational identity as Veneti nel mondo ('Veneto people in the world')-reaching out especially to Veneto speakers in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and the USA. Through an analysis of style shifting between Veneto dialect and Standard Italian in a corpus of naturally recorded data among Veneto speakers, I investigate how they foster and solidify a Veneto identity through opposition to foreigners and the Italian state, and how they build a Veneto transnational identity that stretches beyond regional and national boundaries.