Languages: Italian is the official language in Italy (Statutory national language (1999, Law No. 482, ‘Norme in materia di tutela delle minoranze linguistiche storiche’, Article 1.1). Italy signed but did not ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
Co-official Languages: The same law protects the culture and language of the following population on Italian territory: Albanian, Catalan, Croatian, German, Greek, Slovene and those that speak the following languages: French, French-provencal, Friulian, Ladin, Occitan and Sarde.
Other languages are co-official within certain regions: French in Val d'Aosta, German in Trentino-South Tyrol, Slovene is co-official in some municipalities of the provinces of Trieste and Gorizia, and Sardinian in Sardinia. Ladin municipalities of South Tyrol are trilingual (Italian, Ladin, and German).
Language Strategies: In Italy neither LT strategies nor policies have been defined so far. The 2001 constitutional reform transformed the system of government and the distribution of powers. Regions have legislative power in all matters that are not explicitly covered by state legislation, such as language promotion, use and learning of Italian and regional languages in the corresponding regions and abroad. Regional governments publish public calls for funding translations or generation of content in their official languages. As far as LT is concerned, support to develop LT solutions is included in programmes/policies (either regional or national) that support ICT and/or generic research and innovation projects.
Past Language Strategies: The 1999 law established a National Fund for the Safeguard of Linguistic Minorities at the Prime Minister's Office, providing for the teaching of the above mentioned minority languages and cultural traditions, and for their use in official acts at the national, regional and local level. Furthermore, the law requires the public broadcasting service to safeguard historic minority languages via "Public Service Contracts", under the supervision of the Authority for Guarantees in Communication. On the other hand, the priorities and areas of intervention in Italy are determined as provided by the reform of the National Research System (Legislative Decree no. 204/1998), at government level but languages are not a priority.
Language Technologies: In 1997, HLT was designated a national research policy, with the launch of two three-year projects: Tal: a national framework for developing language resources LRCMM: devoted to mono and multilingual research in computational linguistics, with a view to strengthening innovation in this field (Source: META-NET White Paper Italy). Regional support was available in the Friuli Region:
Grant Dizionari Bilengâl Talian Furlan (GDB TF): a bilingual electronic dictionary from the Italian language to the Friulian language.
In March 2013, the Ministry for Education, Universities and Research (MIUR) presented the Horizon2020 Italy (HIT 2020), and the Agenzia per l'Italia Digitale (AgID), promoted the Strategia per la crescita digitale 2014-2020, that aims at directing the technological choices in the field of ICT in different areas (infrastructure, learning, security, health, tourism, agriculture, smart city & communities, open data, e-business, e-administration…) in the coming years. Not surprisingly, LT are not specially mentioned. However, priorities like e-Tourism or Open Data will need some Language technologies for their implementation.
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