ABSTRACT
Language minority contexts provide important insight into language management processes, as the role of individual stakeholders may be more pronounced in such micro contexts than in larger ones. This chapter analyzes individual and community-based agentive responses to language planning in two linguistic minorities in the Adriatic region: Arbanasi (Zadar, Croatia) and Molise Croatian (Italy). Both communities were formed by migrants who left their regions of origin much before the formation of Croatia and Italy. Although their members do not identify with these communities in ethnic terms, they are affected by multiple language policies: those instantiated by the nation-states that they belong to territorially, and those launched by the nation-states that perceive them as part of their diaspora communities. Language policy is thus largely imposed from above, although agency as produced in stance-taking at the micro-level is crucial in determining its scope and effects. Despite the presence of a variety of voices found within each of the communities, the prevailing agentive responses that affect language management at the grassroots level are very different in the two cases, and may partly be the outcomes of different legal and institutional treatments of minorities in Croatia and Italy.
