engleski

The Istrian spoken multilingual corpus: a representation of a sociolinguistic realty

Spoken language corpora represent a comprehensive data source for investigating contact phenomena in multilingual interactions (e.g. code-switching, amount of languages used, number of languages used, etc.). Multilingual spoken corpus design including standard language and dialectal variation requires many methodological decisions and have been mainly built on elicitation tasks. However, such a methodology does not allow us to see variation in naturally occurring communication (Ruhi and Isik Tas, 2014). Therefore, spontaneous and high interaction speech are essential for representing the nature of discourse in real life situations (Čermak, 2009). The goal of this paper is to describe the sociolinguistic features of the Istrian multilingualism, aiming at shedding light over a potential correspondent contact linguistic model. For that purpose, we present the Istrian spoken multilingual corpus (in preparation), for which the conversational sampling method has been employed. The corpus’ recordings involve native speakers of Istrovenetian/Istriot and/or bilingual/native speakers of three different generations that are being representatively recruited in all the bilingual towns of the Istria County. In the current state, the corpus consists of 51 transcripts and sound recordings with 42 participants of different age (from 22 to 73 years). Current data reveals that the social interactions are determined by double diglossic/imperfectly polyglossic relationships and that the Istrian multilingual Italophone community is mostly a dialectophone community and/or vernacularophone one. Therefore, Italian has never achieved sociolinguistic capillarity and ethnolinguistic vitality. Istrovenetian and Istriot are ethnolinguistically (much) more vital (particularly the Istrovenetian koine’, as Istriotshows signs of language shift towards it) than the Italian language. Furthermore, Croatian and Chakavian, idioms of undeniable social prestige, may cover almost all the entire range of functional communicative needs, serving as constant resources for the regular use of codeswitching.

mulitlingualism, spoken corpus, Istria, Istrovenetian, Istriot, conversations

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