Sociolinguistics Symposium 19
Freie Universität Berlin | August 21-24, 2012
Programme: accepted abstracts
Abstract ID: 1343
Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)
Sociolinguistic aspects and language contact. Evidence from a minority language in Italy
Authors: Perta, Carmela
Submitted by: Perta, Carmela (Università G. d'Annunzio, Italy)
In Italy the coexistence of standard language, Italo-romance varieties and minority languages has been a way to study language contact in different conditions. Particularly minority communities, which are deeply different from each other due to various sociolinguistic conditions, are a valuable ground for the application of language contact approaches.
The focus of this paper is on two minority communities in the south of Italy - Celle San Vito and Faeto - where people speak a variety of Francoprovençal. Despite the few distance between the two towns (they are 3 Km far from each other) and the common situation of isolation from other Francoprovençal communities present in Italy, their sociolinguistic conditions are deeply different, in reference to the functional distribution of languages present in the repertoire, and in reference to the degree of permeability of each Francoprovençal variety towards Italian and its diatopic varieties.
My aim is to analyse language contact phenomena occurring among the languages present in the repertoire of these Francoprovençal communities, both in situations of minority language shift (as in Celle San Vito) and maintenance (as in Faeto). In this light particular attention will be paid to the lexical level, considering a wide range of phenomena, such as nonce borrowings, single word switches and the treatment of collocations; as grammatical features (such as the introduction of single morphemes, the use of connectives or functional words of foreign origin), the influence of foreign traits on the structure of the different languages in contact will be observed.