Antw: ELL: Élites

[Franz Dotter]

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Date: Thu, 07 Oct 1999 08:59:17 +0200
From: "Franz Dotter" <franz.dotter at uni-klu.ac.at>
To: <endangered-languages-l at carmen.murdoch.edu.au>, <tom.priestly at ualberta.ca>
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Dear Tom!

We know each other personally, I think. We once met in Carinthia. Therefore I
would want to slightly correct your picture:
It is not due to the "Slovene gym" that there is some split between social
groups of the minority. This split stems from times where there was no gym. I
remember the times where I dialect speker was estimated as "underdog", for
German speaking as well as (but worse) Slovene speaking people (and all over
Austria and - probably - Germany). The so-called "dialect-wave" in the late
sixties and the seventies brought some change (so you could find e.g. poetry
in Slovene dialect.
In my eyes the narrow-mindedness of some Slovene representatives (under them
also intellectuals) concerning the behavior against dialects (which vary a lot
in Carinthia) and the "better" Slovenian variant in the "mother country"
(Slovenia) has for dozens of years reduced the solidarity of Slovene dialect
speakers to the minority. I do not think that this is the most important
factor, but it is one which made its contributions to minority reduction.
The gym (and many Slovenes becoming students elsewhere) have the consequence
that better educated people do not find employment in the region of the
minority. So now we have big comunities of Slovenes in Vienna and Klagenfurt
or Villach. They lose their Slovene (or even bilingual) environment. Thats the
problem.

Best Regards

Franz

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