KONTATTO: A laboratory for the study of language contact in South Tyrol

Between 2011 and 2019 two research projects were financed by the Autonomous Province of Bozen-Bolzano (South Tyrol, Italy) that allowed a research group led by the two authors to be set up to work extensively on language contact. One of the major outcomes of these two research projects was the creation of a corpus of spoken Tyrolean (KONTATTO) and of a few other secondary corpora (KONTATTI) devoted to Italo-Romance dialects, as well as Cimbrian and Ladin. At present, these datasets constitute an open lab aimed at further investigating language contact and experimenting methods of handling spontaneous speech. The studies carried out so far are characterized by a corpus-based approach, highlighting the importance of frequency and, more generally, of use in language contact. These research projects explored an area in North-Eastern Italy, where different language groups have been in contact for a long time: a main language border between Germanic and Romance crosses the region, and a secondary border runs between the Italo-Romance (Trentino dialects) and the Rhaeto-Romance (Ladin) linguistic areas. In addition, two German-speaking enclaves (Mòcheno and Cimbro) are located within the Romance domain, with no direct contacts with the wider German-speaking region. However, despite the fact that on a language map all these linguistic areas, large or small as they might be, are neatly separated from each other, speakers cross these borders all the time and language varieties come into contact with each other in everyday language use according to explicit or implicit community norms and individual discourse strategies. After an initial, exploratory phase, the research team decided to focus on the area that proved to be of greatest interest for the study of language contact and its stratification over time. Particularly promising was the bordering region between Südtirol and Welschtirol, locally known as (Südtiroler) Unterland, in Italian Bassa Atesina, a locus of intense language contact for several centuries, long before the Italian occupation of South Tyrol in 1918. As a result of subsequent migration flows from Trentino to these Tyrolean lowlands, a truly bilingual (in fact bi-dialectal: Trentino and Tyrolean)