{"id":638,"date":"2022-12-13T14:00:55","date_gmt":"2022-12-13T13:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.dlls.univr.it\/alpilink\/progetto\/"},"modified":"2026-03-12T15:13:43","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T14:13:43","slug":"progetto","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/alpilink.it\/en\/progetto\/","title":{"rendered":"AlpiLinK"},"content":{"rendered":"
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AlpiLinK<\/span><\/span><\/h2>
German-Romance Language Contact in the Italian Alps: documentation, explanation, participation<\/span><\/span><\/h5><\/div><\/div>
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The AlpiLinK<\/strong> (Alpine Languages in Contact)<\/span> project, developed in collaboration between the <\/span>Universities of Verona, Trento, Bolzano-Bozen, Turin, and Aosta Valley, <\/span>aims at promoting and investigating t<\/span>he Germanic, Romance<\/span> and Slavic minority languages and dialects spoken <\/span>across the Alpine regions of Italy: Piedmont, Aosta Valley, Lombardy, Veneto, Trentino-South Tyrol, and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. The project was funded 2022-2025 by the Italian Research Ministry as ‘project of relevant national interest\u2019 (Progetto di ricerca di rilevante interesse nazionale<\/em>, PRIN, call 2020, project n.\u00a0 2020SYSYBS).
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AlpiLinK is a continuation and expansion of the VinKo<\/a> (Varieties in Contact) project of the Universities of Verona, Trento, and Bolzano-Bozen, and it is from this project that the digital infrastructure was inherited. More information can be found in the VinKo<\/strong> project description<\/a> and in Kruijt, Rabanus & Tagliani (2023).<\/span><\/p>\n

AlpiLinK follows an Open Science Policy<\/a> which includes the FAIR principles<\/a> for the data management, e.g. guaranteeing the permanent accessibility of contents and the simple resusability of data thanks to open licenses. All data collected in AlpiLinK can be found in the AlpiLinK corpus<\/a><\/strong> (Rabanus et al. 2026) on Zenodo. All details on the project during the official duration \u00a0(from June 2022 to June 2025) are documented in the AlpiLinK project report<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>

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Documentation<\/span><\/span><\/h3>
Crowdsourcing linguistic data<\/span><\/span><\/h5>

AlpiLinK aims to document cross-linguistically comparable data from the non-standard language varieties, e.g. dialects and minority languages, spoken in the alpine regions of Italy. The data collection in the project was done via online crowdsourcing on this website. Any speaker of the investigated language varieties, e.g. Walser German<\/a> or Venetan dialect<\/a> (for full list go to “Our Varieties<\/a>“), could register on the platform and participate in the linguistic survey by audio-recording their answers to a variety of linguistic tasks (e.g. translation, image description etc.<\/span>). <\/span><\/p>\n

The collected audio files are freely accessible on the interactive map \u201cListen & Explore<\/a>\u201d, <\/span>which can be consulted by anyone interested in exploring the gathered data and learning more about the multilingual environment characterising the area under investigation.\u00a0<\/span>The data is also stored in an periodically updated online repository which constitutes a valuable open-access resource for both the researchers and the members of the communities involved (Rabanus et al. 2026).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>

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Explanation<\/span><\/span><\/h3>
Why my \/s\/ sounds different than yours<\/span><\/span><\/h5>

AlpiLinK investigates a selection of linguistic features through the comparative analysis of linguistic audio data collected via crowdsourcing. Linguistic research of the different features of a language can provide insight into a place\u2019s history, culture, and social structure. To illustrate this, let\u2019s have a brief look at the way that people pronounce <s> across Trentino-South Tyrol and Veneto. In the Tyrolean dialects, the pronunciation of the <s> depends on where it occurs in a word and by which sound it is followed. For example, when the <s> occurs word-initially before <p, t, k, m, n, l, w> it is pronounced like <sh>([\u0283] in the <\/span>International Phonetic Alphabet<\/span><\/a>). However, word-medially in front of <m> or <n>, it is pronounced as a \u201cregular\u201d <s>. Hear the difference yourself and compare the words s<\/span>peziell<\/span><\/i> \u2018special\u2019 and <\/span>Rosmarin<\/span><\/i> \u2018rosemary\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

Speziell<\/em> ‘special’ (Tyrolean)<\/p>\nhttps:\/\/alpilink.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/F0156_tir_U07.flac<\/a><\/audio>\n

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or <\/span>Rosmarin<\/em> ‘rosemary’ (Tyrolean)<\/p>\nhttps:\/\/alpilink.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/F0169_tir_U07.flac<\/a><\/audio>\n

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This difference in pronunciation is known as <\/span>s-retraction<\/span><\/i>. This phenomenon is common in German varieties, but not very common in Romance languages, e.g. Trentino and Venetan dialects. Interestingly, the Ladin languages, part of the (Rhaeto-)Romance family, form an exception to this rule. For example, in Gardenese Ladin, a very similar pattern to the Tyrolean dialects is found, where the <s> word-initially before <p, t, k, m, n, l, f, v> is pronounced as <sh> like in <\/span>‘fish’, i.e. [\u0283], and like a \u201cregular\u201d <s> word-medially in front of <m>. Listen to <\/span>spiedl <\/span><\/i>\u2018mirror\u2019 and <\/span>rosmarin<\/span><\/i> \u2018rosemary\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

Spiedl<\/em> ‘mirror’ (Gardenese Ladin)<\/p>\nhttps:\/\/alpilink.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/W0122_lldgh_U0543.flac<\/a><\/audio>\n

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Rosmarin<\/em> ‘rosemary’ (Gardenese Ladin)<\/p>\nhttps:\/\/alpilink.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/W0159_lldgh_U0543.flac<\/a><\/audio>\n

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The difference between Ladin and the other Romance varieties most likely comes from a mix of language-internal changes and language-contact effects. For centuries Ladin speakers have interacted with and in German varieties, exposing them to their different <s> pronunciations and the system behind these different pronunciations. However, not only historic contact with other peoples can play a role, but also the internal structures of the language itself. Many dialect communities in Trentino have had similar long-term contacts with German varieties, but the Trentino dialects only have a single version of <s>. This is due to a structural difference between Ladin and the <\/span>dialects of Trentino<\/span><\/a>. Historically, Ladin developed a contrast between [\u0283] and [\u015b] (a sound half-way in between [s] and [\u0283]). Throughout time the intermediate [\u015b] was changed in its pronunciation. Depending on the context the old sound has been either retracted and merged with [\u0283] or fronted to the \u201cregular\u201d [s], resulting in the above described [s]-[\u0283] alternation in Ladin. Contrastingly, the Trentino dialects historically only had [\u015b] and not [\u0283]. Hence, they lacked the preconditions for the retraction of [\u015b] to [\u0283]. In this way the distribution of the <s> pronunciatons in Ladin is the result of a language-internal process supported by the intense contact with the German varieties (Alber, Kokkelmans & Rabanus 2021).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/section>

Participation<\/span><\/span><\/h3>
Community engagement with the project<\/span><\/span><\/h5>

Community engagement with the project and the collected data is an integral part of the crowdsourcing methodology and a way to further promote citizen science and demonstrate the value of scientific research for the preservation and validation of intangible cultural heritage. The cornerstone of\u00a0 the terza missione<\/em> aspect of AlpiLinK is the subproject<\/span> VinKiamo<\/a><\/strong>. VinKiamo is is an activity for students from secondary schools, who actively participate in collecting linguistic data within their local communities by helping different generations of speakers from the various locations participate in the AlpiLinK questionnaire. In doing so, VinKiamo promotes an intergenerational dialogue that aims at bridging the gap between the advanced digital skills of younger generations and the rich cultural and linguistic knowledge of the elderly speakers. This collaboration ensures the safeguarding of local languages and multilingualism as part of the cultural heritage through the collection of oral sources that would otherwise go lost.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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References<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n