Chapter 8 Sociolinguistic typology and language contact in Northern Italy

Abstract

Despite the fact that the linguistic outcomes of contact strongly depend on the structures of the languages involved, it is sociolinguistic factors that cause language contact to occur in the first place and to determinate its intensity and its direction (Thomason and Kaufman 1988). In particular, the sociolinguistic profile of the speech community in terms of linguistic repertoire, sociolinguistic norms and language use patterns play a significant role in shaping the outcomes of language contact. Decades of scholarly research in the fields of contact and historical linguistics have claimed that almost everything is possible in language contact and that constraints are easily violated by counterexamples. Yet, this does not mean that everything is equally likely to occur in any sociolinguistic setting (or “scenarios”, cf. Muysken 2010). Italian and German, or rather Italo-Romance and Upper German varieties spoken in Northern Italy (Rabanus et al. 2019), provide an excellent test bench to verify the impact of sociolinguistic factors in language contact. In fact, a large number of German varieties are spoken in Italy’s alpine regions where they have been in contact with Standard Italian and/ or Italo-Romance dialects for a long time (in some cases up to eight-nine centuries), differing from each other on many levels: status, official recognition, geographical continuity, access to Standard German, bi- multilingualism. Such differences are related to qualitative and quantitative variation of language contact phenomena in speech. Based on the outcomes of several research projects (cf. i.a. Dal Negro 2015 and Ciccolone and Dal Negro 2021) and on a large amount of conversational data documenting language use in a selection of sociolinguistically differentiated German-speaking speech communities in Northern Italy, the chapter focuses on instances of borrowing and explores comparatively their distribution in speech. The comparative analysis through all these speech communities is carried out taking into account quantitative factors such as the amount of borrowings in current speech, POS distribution, the relative weight of functional and lexical borrowings, types/tokens ratio of borrowed items and more general features such as directionality of borrowings, presence or absence of formal adaptation, variability of occurrence vs. fusion within the system.