Dec. 17 – 19-year-old Martina Iori, originally from Valle di Fassa, is the winner of the “Liet International 2014”, the international music festival of minority languages, held recently in Oldenburg, Lower Saxony, Germany. “Via con me musega” is the title of the song with which Martina attended the festival, a song thanks to which on November 15 she was awarded the first prize in Udine’s Suns music competition, the music contest open to Italian, Austrian and Swiss minority or regional language artists. The song, written and performed by Iori in Ladin alongside a beat of bass and drums, pays tribute to the minority idiom spoken in Trentino, Alto Adige / Südtirol and in the province of Belluno. Thorsten Afflerbach, head of the Secretariat of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, an international treaty that aims to protect and promote the use of regional and minority languages across Europe, delivered the award. The President of the Autonomous Province of Trento Ugo Rossi expressed his personal satisfaction, “which must extend to the entire community of Fassa and more generally for those in Trentino. Martina Iori, with her cool and elegant voice, brought the sweet melodies of Ladin on the European stage. We now have tangible proof, if any was ever necessary, that minority languages are perfectly able to compete with the most popular languages for expressive skills, and they still know how talk to young people.”
