La construction d'un territoire de minorité entre revendications, conflits et institutionnalisation. Le cas des Vallées occitanes d'Italie

The aim of this paper is to understand the emergence of the Italian Occitan valleys as a defined territory and the process of identity construction it underlies. The definition of a reference area is a major challenge for the “oc” ethno-linguistic claim and it is both a reason of confrontation between minority and majority as a struggle field inside the minority itself. In the “langue d'oc” Piedmont valleys, two regionalist movements - occitanisme and provençalisme - produce two identity and territorial claims from the same language. That gives rise to a conflict that only the recognition of Occitan by the Italian State in 1999 managed to settle. Since then, a cultural policy for linguistic minorities was implemented, developing powerful and original tools of identity and territorial construction, that we intend to analyze here.