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Dec.26/04 - Jan.2, 2005 |
16 - Advantages of investing in Italian
Italy's Toronto Consul General Brofferio believes in importance of language
By Antonio Maglio
Originally Published: 2003-04-13
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Luca Brofferio
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Prof. Paolo Balboni, dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature at Venice's Università Ca' Foscari remarked that, whereas people all over the world are asking Italy to organize Italian language courses, in Canada and the United States there are those who ask for money without any strings attached. All funds are used for the diffusion of Italian, but Balboni underscored the refusal of any control.
"Well, the mechanism is fairly simple: the Italian government gives annual contributions to several institutions abroad, called 'managing institutions', for them to promote the study of our language," says Luca Brofferio, Consul General of Italy in Toronto. "The managing institutions sign agreements with the school boards that are interested in including Italian in their curricula, and pay out for the teachers, educational material and promotional activities. Therefore, a first form of control is exerted by the managing institutions, which have a keen interest in getting results from those contributions, lest Rome freezes them. A second and third level of control is exerted by the Consulates of the districts where these managing institutions and school boards are located and by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These controls verify the correct use of the funds."
Luca Brofferio, Consul General of Italy in Toronto for the past four months, tackles the problem of the diffusion of Italian in Ontario with pragmatism: "If one divides the amount of the contributions by the number of students attending Italian language classes," he continues, "the result, to the tune of a few dozen euro each, amply justifies the investment."
However, in both primary and high schools enrolment in Italian courses is down. Does it mean that the investment has lost its appeal, that Italian in Canada is no longer attractive?
"The decrease is real, and it worries me, especially because it is larger than that suffered by the other great Romance language, Spanish. First of all, I rule out the possibility of Italian not attracting any more. It may be decreasing in schools, but still over 31,000 youngsters are studying it right now. That's something. I would rather interpret this recession as due to objective factors: the cutbacks to language teaching, which triggered a conviction that foreign languages are not as important as the subjects linked to business and economy. I noticed a lack of attention by Canadian authorities to certain educational processes. And yet, multilinguism should be the way to multiculturalism. I almost suspect that multiculturalism could be practiced mechanically, as a compulsory act. French, the second national language spoken only in Quebec, proves the failure of this policy."
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