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In South Tyrol the Italian and German languages have coexisted for centuries. After a problematic development in the first half of the 20th century the situation has stabilised through an intense programme to protect the German-speaking minority living there. Though these protective measures were introduced primarily to keep the linguistic identity of the Italian and German language groups stable, they have led to a considerable degree of individual bilingualism, especially with the speakers of German. At the same time certain means were introduced to facilitate the use of German in the legal and administrative context of Italy. So these steps at the end have led to an intensified contact between the languages, and there is a growing awareness of the advantages of speaking more than one language. With the opening towards Europe and with general trends in society like globalisation and individualisation, a new model of a bilingual identity is developing which takes into consideration its usefulness in modem transcultural interaction as well as its value for regional self-identification. This development also leads to a higher degree of linguistic variation in the society of South Tyrol.
This article aims to show that it is only by comparing different multilingual communities that a typologically relevant description of such communities is made possible. An example (Brix, 1982) is presented to demonstrate that a usable description of such regions is implicitly based on comparison and what factors are important in this respect. It is shown that only a model of variables which can comprise the analogous traits of the situations as well as the differences between them enables an adequate comparison to be made. The examples of the Croats in the Burgenland and of the Slovenes in Carinthia show what the consequences for the description of the situations are and what difficulties arise with such a description. The domains of the semi-official use of language are examined to find out what parallels and differences in the factors which are used for the description of multilingual communities (e.g. economic situation, legislation, historical development, sociolinguistic situation) can be related the peculiarities of language use in the two situations. In this way typological similarities and certain idiosyncratic characteristics of the two regions can be understood.