GAETA Livio - MIUR - PRIN 2017 Linea A - CLiMAlp: Corpus linguistics meets Alpine cultural heritage: documenting and safeguarding linguistic minorities in the Alps

From the Middle-Ages until the last century, the Alps, a land of extreme conditions, have been both a boundary and a crossroad of cultures, languages and world views, meeting point and periphery of the large cultural areas in Europe. For centuries Alpine settlements have been protected by a low contact regime of communications, a self-contained social and economic model and in some cases even by an explicit reference to different cultural centers compared to those of the lowlands. The consequence of recent changes is that Alpine communities are now exposed to a new cultural environment that threats language, practices, traditions and even the very existence of traditional societies. At the same time, the recent condition of openness has made them wonderful examples of multilingualism. This is particularly true for the Walser communities of Piedmont and Aosta Valley, which go back to the spread in the late Middle-Ages of settlers coming from the high Rhone valley (the so-called Wallis, from Ministero dell'Istruzione dell'Università e della Ricerca MIUR - BANDO 2017 - 4 - which Wal(li)ser) and speaking a variety of Highest Alemannic largely preserved in the Swiss territories. In the last century, these communities have witnessed a dramatic process of language shift in favor both of the Standard Italian language promoted by the administration and the cultural institutions and of the Gallo-Italian dialectal varieties largely employed in the context in which the Walser communities are immersed as linguistic islands. This has evidently brought heavy consequences on the Alemannic varieties spoken by the communities with the effect of accelerating dramatically the process of language decay, ultimately leading to the language death. In spite of clear differences relating to the dialectal continuum which is not disturbed by cases of migrations of single speakers’ communities, a partially similar picture can be sketched also for the Occitan and Franco-Provençal communities to the extent that strong contact phenomena with the Standard Italian variety as well as with the other Gallo-Italian dialects have created the basis for a clear differentiation of these varieties with regard both to their corresponding varieties spoken in France and to the dialectal continuum, especially distinguishing the varieties spoken in the heights of the Alps from those spoken down in the valleys, which makes this environment conducive to a language endangerment situation. In this light, it is particularly urgent to collect and preserve this heritage because of the serious risk of losing completely its testimony within the time span of one or at most two generations of speakers. The main objective of this project is to provide a careful documentation of the Germanic and the Romance varieties spoken as linguistic islands or minorities in Aosta Valley and Piedmont exploiting the means made available nowadays by corpus linguistics. The documentation of cultural and linguistic interest will be collected into a digital archive hosted on a platform which will give access to an online dictionary interfaced with the corpus. This platform results from earlier research projects and is currently available online (at www.diwac.it). It is based on a specific software developed for constructing digital archives of small languages registered as “Arc.A.Di”. Each lexical entry of the dictionary is actually equipped with the usual details referring to the graphematic, the morphological, the syntactic and the semantic level. Moreover, one of the goals of this research project is to expand the extant dictionary in order to host specific details relating to the phonetic realization of the entries, previously acquired and elaborated by means of a program of speech analysis and digitalization. The platform hosting the dictionary and the corpus will be freely consultable online to all speakers of the communitie