The Decay of a Language

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 endangered language.

Autorentext

The Author: Silvia Dal Negro, born in Zürich in 1968, teaches Linguistics at the Università del Piemonte Orientale and conducts research on minority languages, dialects and language contact in northern Italy. Her research interests also include phenomena of language contact and acquisition in Switzerland and multilingualism in Italy.

Klappentext

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 endangered language.

Zusammenfassung
«... Dal Negros exzellente Arbeit [hat] Bedeutung über das enge Feld der italienischen Sprachinselforschung hinaus.» (Stefan Rabanus, Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik)

Inhalt

Contents: The perspective of language decay and death - Walser dialects - Language minorities in Italy - The German-speaking community of Formazza - Linguistic profile of traditional Pomattertitsch - Maintenance and decay of noun morphology - Attrition and change in the system of gender - Reanalysis of Verb-Subject sequences - Tun-periphrasis - Maintenance and decay of verb morphology - The construction and deconstruction of language - Patterns of language obsolescence.