German and Romance varieties in contact in northeastern Italy

Abstract

Northeastern Italy offers several sites where a variety of German is in contact with Italian, Italo-Romance, or Rhaeto-Romance: All of these contact situations vary according to sociolinguistic and extralinguistic factors, such as the composition of the speech community, structure of linguistic repertoires, language status, standardization, and demography. These factors combine into more or less coherent speech community types that, in turn, constrain the typology of contact linguistic phenomena that can be observed. In this contribution, based on the trilingual region of South Tyrol, a few emblematic case studies will be discussed focusing on insertional mechanisms that occur in speech. Based on the outcomes of a larger research project and drawing on various corpora of conversational data, quantitative and qualitative aspects of this contact situation will be explored in more detail.