Regional varieties of Italian in the linguistic repertoire.

This paper focuses on regional Italian as a special observatory for both synchronic and diachronic variation in Italian. After a brief overview of some key concepts (Section 1) and the state of the art (Section 2), I consider regional Italian in a language-contact perspective (Section 3). In addition, I analyze it from the viewpoint of the reciprocal relationship between dimensions of linguistic variation (Section 4). The topics addressed here range from the process of language shift from Italo-Romance dialects toward Italian to the decreasing regional markedness of contemporary Italian. They therefore include issues related to native-like competence, ongoing restandardization, and developmental tendencies in Italian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]