The Decay of a Language: The Case of a German Dialect in the Italian AlpsP. Lang, 2004 - 261 pages Topic of this volume is Pomattertitsch, a German dialect which is doomed to extinction. This Allemanic (Walser) dialect is spoken at Formazza, a tiny Alpine community in Italy, and after centuries of semi-secluded existence is now undergoing major transformations due to the rapidly declining number of its speakers and the limited range of its functions. Within the framework of language decay and death this analysis focuses on phenomena of linguistic variation at a morphosyntactic level. This comprehensive study includes a large body of spoken data collected from informants of different age groups and with different levels of language fluency and thus displays a unique picture of an endagered language. |
Contents
Preface Gaetano Berruto | 9 |
The Perspective of language death | 17 |
The Walser community of Formazza | 47 |
Copyright | |
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Common terms and phrases
adjectives Adriana Alemannic dialects Alps Anna Arianna ässä bilinguals Bosco Gurin calques characterized clitics contexts corpus dative dative marking declension dialect of Formazza dialect speakers Dorian Dyirbal Edvige especially example fact feminine Formazza Franco frequent functions gender genitive Giacalone Ramat Giorgio Giovanna grammatical grammaticalization Gressoney Guglielmo infinitive inflected informants instance Italian Jolanda Kurzverben language attrition language death language shift levelling linguistic Lorena loss Luca maintenance masculine minority language morphological morphosyntactic neuter nominative/accusative nouns observed obsolescence occur paradigms past participle periphrastic forms phenomena phenomenon plural Pomattertitsch predicative prepositions present preterite recordings reduction regards Riccardo Rimella Rino semi-speakers Silvana singular sociolinguistic speak speech community Standard German studies subject clitics subject pronouns Swiss German Swiss German dialects Table Tarcisio the:M titsch töt traditional translations tun periphrasis typical Upper German varieties verb forms verb-subject Walser colonies Walser dialects Walser German weak whereas young Zürrer