“Was ist, wenn die Ausschreibung tschari geht?” Linguistic findings from Carabinieri investigations in a multilingual setting (German, Italian, Dialect)

In spring 2022, a political scandal shakes the Autonomous Province of Bolzano in Italy (in short: South Tyrol) and leads to a government crisis that will also affect the upcoming provincial elections in autumn 2023. In addition, further court proceedings in this cause are to be expected. This case is unusual and relevant from a linguistic-forensic perspective for several reasons: South Tyrol is one of the few regions in Europe with constitutionally enshrined bilingualism. Italian and German are regional official languages and are thus also used in court and all public institutions. Moreover, this scandal is based on a "data leak". More than 6,000 pages of police investigation and court files as well as more than 500 hours of telephone recordings, surveillance reports and WhatsApp chat histories were anonymously leaked to two local journalists (Franceschini & Oberhofer: 2021: 11f). 

The reason for the undercover investigations by the Carabinieri is the suspicion of irregularities in the awarding of public contracts in local public transport worth about one billion euros (ibid.: 158). In addition to the criminally relevant statements, however, the analysis of the meaning of incriminated statements is particularly relevant (Fobbe: 271). Although legally difficult to grasp, these statements are perceived as unacceptable in the public discussion and lead to resignations of political exponents. The corpus "Friends in the Edelweiss" (Edelweiss is an allusion to the party emblem of the governing party "South Tyrolean People's Party" SVP), excerpts of which are publicly accessible, is of outstanding interest from a linguistic point of view, as it allows us to trace the peculiarities of oral and written language use in South Tyrol through discourse analysis. 

Based on reconstructive-hermeneutic analysis, the constant alternation between standard Italian (= official language of the summary written protocols), standard German and the mix of regional dialect interspersed with Italianisms will be described. This code-switching has a very special function in South Tyrolean discourses, which can be considered exemplary for multilingual settings. (Risse 2013). The latter serves to disguise and camouflage, which in turn complicates the presentation of evidence in legal as well as political terms. It will be shown to what extent approaches of forensic linguistics in combination with discourse-analytical methods can serve to clarify political scandals and probably legally relevant details. Conversely, this contribution is also intended as an impulse to the forensic linguistics to expand its field of work from focusing on purely legally relevant issues to the area of political communication. 

References:

1. Fobbe, E. (2017) : Forensische Linguistik. In : Handbuch Sprache im Recht, ed. by E. Felder & F. Vogel, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter pp. 271-289
2. Franceschini, C. & /Oberhofer, A. (2022): Freunde im Edelweiss. Ein Sittenbild der Südtiroler Politik. Bozen
3. Risse, S. (2013): Sieg und Frieden. Zum sprachlichen und politischen Handeln in Südtirol/Sudtirolo/Alto Adige. München: iudicium

Footnote:

Was ist, wenn die Ausschreibung tschari geht? – What if the tender goes down the drain? « Tschari » is a typical expression of South Tyrolean German, hardly to understand even for native German speakers.