Attitudes towards language in a polylingual communicative space: a key to the identity of Italian borderland residents

The article is devoted to the issue of human attitudes to language in a polylingual communicative space. This problematic, related to the ability of a person to preserve national-cultural and personal self-identification and to discover tools to ensure mutual understanding in society, becomes especially relevant now, during the powerful geopolitical transformations accompanied by multidirectional processes of globalisation and increased attention to the uniqueness of regions. The aim of the article is to identify the mechanisms of linguistic realisation of the identity of the inhabitants of the Italian region of Valle d’Aosta where the minority Francoprovençal is actively manifested against the background of official French-Italian bilingualism. The study is based on a sociolinguistic survey conducted in October 2023 as a part of the joint project between the academic centres in Italy and Germany: the Centre for Francoprovençal Studies and the Institute of Romance Languages at the Humboldt University of Berlin. The sample consists of responses from residents born in the commune of San Nicola between 1923 and 2009 and registered here at the time of the survey. This paper analyses the respondents' answers to the question «Which language do you think best corresponds to the following statements?», taking into account different communicative situations. The use of such a direct questionnaire methodology made it possible to obtain detailed answers to the question sought, the analysis of which is presented in the section «Results of the study (discussion)». The data obtained indicate the dependence of the practice of using French, Francoprovençal and Italian in the speech of Valdostanians on attitudes towards language. The linguistic mechanisms of identity construction of Waldostans are examined with reference to intimate and status institutionalised contexts. In its broad manifestation, the results of the study are significant for realising the processes taking place in the contact zones of closely related languages, for example, Russian and Belarusian.