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Data collection for AlpiLinK started in July 2023 with the opening of the online questionnaire (if you want to participate, go to Participate) and has been running ever since. In the period of July 2023 to June 2024, there has been a total of 1030 participants from 505 different locations. Speakers from 15 different language varieties have participated and they contributed more than 35.000 audio files for research.
The average age of participants is 47,4 years, so quite close to the average age in Italy, which is 46,4 years (ISTAT, 2022). The youngest participant is a speaker of Francoprovensal of 4 years old and the oldest speaker is 101 years old, from Val Badia, and speaks Ladin. If we look at the different linguistic varieties, Walser German has the highest average age at 74,5 years, while the youngest group are the Ladin speakers with an average of 37,5 years.
The gender distribution is very balanced with 49,7% identifying as male, 49,4% female and 0,9% selecting ‚other‘. The language varieties with a high average age also tend to have a high percentage of female speakers (e.g., Walser German: 74,5 years and 77% female, Plodar: 60,5 years and 75% female).
At the start of the questionnaire participants are presented with some statements and asked to either agree or disagree with these statements. See the graphs below for a full overview of all the varieties and their answers to these statements. The first statement is ‚I speak my language/dialect well‘. Here we find that for the most part, our participants are confident in their linguistic competency. A vast majority of speakers for all varieties indicate that they either strongly agree (dark green) or agree (green). They are also asked if they speak their linguistic variety often and if they speak it with friends or with family. Some varieties, such as Tyrolean, are spoken very frequently and both with friends and family, which is in line with what we know about the daily of use of the Tyrolean dialects in South Tyrol. Others, like Lombardo or Piemontese, are not spoken as frequently and to a lesser degree in the family or with friends, indicating that dialect use is decreasing in these areas.
For access to all data, go to the AlpiLinK corpus via the following link: https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.8360169.
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