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Faetar is an under-documented variety descended from Francoprovençal and spoken in two isolated Apulian villages in southern Italy as well as in the emigrant diaspora, especially in the Greater Toronto Area. Speakers use two series of subject pronouns (strong and weak pronouns), producing sentences with zero, one or two overt subject pronouns. The status of the overt forms as subject pronouns, emphatic pronouns, left- or right-dislocated pronouns, clitics, or affixes is not clear. Contrary to the predictions of the Null Subject Parameter hypothesis (Perlmutter 1971, Deep and surface structure constraints in syntax. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston; Chomsky 1981, Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris), these grammars have subject pronoun paradigms that are variable and conditioned by a number of linguistic factors (including person, tense, information status and subject type). This article delineates which aspects vary diachronically, spatially, or between individuals – a necessary prerequisite to constructing a theoretical model that accounts for this variation. By comparing the patterns of use in France, Italy, and Toronto, and using sources that span nearly a century, we see that despite the very small size of its speech community, Faetar shows little sign of accommodating to English’s virtually categorical presence of subject pronouns, nor to Italian’s high null subject (hereafter Ø-subject) rate, nor to the conditioning effects found in those languages.

Since the publication of the first and (until now) only volume, many have given up for lost the materials from the Linguistic Atlas of the Iberian Peninsula survey, begun in 1931 under the direction of Tomas Navarro Tomas. The apparent disappearance of these materials meant a terrible blow to Hispanic dialectology. After several years of searching, the author found all the ALPI survey notebooks in different locations in Spain. The survey notebooks contain raw data of great scientific value from a historical point of view, as well as for recent trends in morphosyntactic dialectology. In order to make these materials available to the scientific community without the laborious retranscription of the data, author has undertaken to publish scanned images of the original notebooks electronically on the Internet. Possible benefits of this approach include not only considerable savings of time and expense, but also a greater fidelity to the original transcriptions.