The regional law 38/01 and the amendment of L.R. 26/07
aim to protect the Slovenian minority in the Friuli Venezia-Giulia region but
the Resian people has been included in it despite the proven and documented fact
that in the Valley of Resia the Slovene minority does not exist and has
never existed.
As a matter of fact, Resian people have never shared with Slovenia anything such as their territory, history, traditions or tongue
Recent genetic tests (made within the regional “Genetic park of Friuli VG” project) have revealed without doubt that Resians have a unique genome in Europe and, therefore, they are not even distant relatives of Slovenes.
Famous worldwide linguists (prof. Hamp, and others) claim
the resian language to be a very interesting Slavic archaic language and that it
can not be a dialect of Slovenia since its origin is independent from the
development of the Slovenian language. The resian language is recognized as a Slavic
archaic language by UNESCO which has inserted it into the Atlas of Languages in danger of extinction.
In the report on minorities in the Alpe Adria regione, prepared in
1990 by the Working Group composed representatives of Burgenland, Friuli VG,
Croatia, Slovenia, Trentino - Alto Adige and Veneto, our language is called
"a minor linguistic community, an ancient settlement " and it has
never been declared as a Slovenian minority. This distinction has also enacted by
L.R. 68/81 art. 25 and 46/91 art. 2a, which provides, in respect of municipal
statutes, the protection of local historical languages and it was never meant to link the two languages in such a direct way, making the Resian language a subset of the Slovenian one. The insistence of few people on
their side for Slovenian’s interests (political and economic) is perceived as a severe risk of destroying the resian identity.
The Association "Identity
and Protection Resia" has recently called the people of Resia to
participate in the collection of signatures - an initiative loyal, social, administrative
and legal, not political - to ask the Regional Authorities in Friuli VG for a
fair relocation of the Resian Community who legitimately owns all the numbers
and constitutional law to be recognized as a minority in its own right. 