VinKo - Varietäten im Kontakt/Varietà in Contatto/Varieties in Contact

The VinKo project consists of an online platform with questionnaires on morphology, syntax and phonology and is aimed at collecting linguistic data from Romance and Germanic non-standard speech varieties in Trentino/South Tyrol and Veneto (and some language islands in Friuli). VinKo makes use of online crowd-sourcing in order to reach as many participants as possible and to collect data from a wide range of localities across the regions. Participants can contribute to the project by registering on the VinKo website and recording their own responses using the built-in microphone of the platform. There is a variety of tasks on the page - e.g., translations from Italian/German into their local speech variety, the description of pictures and conversations, the pronunciation of single-word dialect items - which the participants are asked to complete. The recordings are collected and stored in the online database which serves as a corpus for both the researchers and the speech community members of the involved linguistic varieties. Furthermore, a selection of the recordings is visualized on the open-access section of the webpage through an interactive map (GIS), which can be used by participants and anyone interested in exploring the collected data and learning more about the multilingual environment of the Trentino/South Tyrol and Veneto regions. The full corpus can be downloaded from the repository of the Eurac Research Clarin Centre (ERCC):

VinKo (Varieties in Contact) Corpus: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12124/32

The project has two main objectives. The first is to provide a detailed description of linguistic microvariation in the area and the linguistic influences existing in phonology, morphology and syntax between the Germanic and Romance varieties, and to formulate generalizations which are valid for the general theory of language contact. The second objective is to increase the knowledge of widespread multilingualism in the area and the awareness of local languages which are a crucial part of the cultural heritage as it merits safeguarding and refinement. In this respect, an important integration is constituted by the VinKiamo subproject, a PCTO activity developed in collaboration with the Regional School Office for Veneto, in which the students from upper secondary schools are trained and act as research assistants within their local communities, also promoting the intergenerational dialogue with elderly speakers of the local speech varieties.

VinKiamo: https://sites.hss.univr.it/vinkiamo

The research is realized in collaboration with researchers at the Universities of Trento and Bolzano.

Project page: https://www.vinko.it/

Contact: vinko@ateneo.univr.it

Descrizione breve del progetto in italiano

Pitch-Video auf Deutsch