Sociolinguistic Aspects and Language Contact: Evidence from Francoprovençal of Apulia

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate two Francoprovençal speaking communities in the Italian region of Apulia, Faeto and Celle di St. Vito. Despite the regional neighborhood of the two towns, and their common isolation from other Francoprovençal speaking communities, their sociolinguistic conditions are deeply different. They differ in reference to the functional distribution of the languages of the repertoire and speakers’ language uses, and in reference to the degree of ‘permeability’ of Francoprovençal varieties towards Italian and its dialects. The repertoire composition and the relationship between the codes have a key role both for minority language maintenance and for language contact processes. In this perspective, I analyse some language contact phenomena in a sample of speakers discourse. I report correlations between the choice of different code-mixing strategies and three sociolinguistic variables (age, sex and village), but not with occupation.