Le lingue pluricentriche: il caso dell’italiano

This paper is a brief summary of the most salient features of the theory of pluricentric languages and the concept of non-dominance within pluricentric languages. The paper also attempts to develop some key points of the pluricentricity of languages that have be criticized by a group of German scholars that deny the existence of national varieties. However, there is a considerable number of research works that are based on em-pirically well-founded data that show that there is no reality behind these claims. A large part of the paper is deals with the concepts of dominance and non-dominance and their associated implications. Finally, some recommendations for dealing with the negative effects of non-dominance are presented. An overall description of the theory of pluricentric languages can be found in the recently published volume of Muhr (2025): Fundamentals of a General Theory of Pluricentric Langauges. PCL-Press.

When Swiss institutions write their communications in Italian, do they write clearly? And do they differ from Italian institutions in this respect? In order to answer these questions, the present contribution aims to ana-lyse both lexical and syntactical aspects of the institutional communica-tion of the two countries during the pandemic. Our results confirm that Swiss texts are written in a clearer way with respect to the Italian ones. In addition, our findings highlight the need to reconsider the validity of the syntactic parameters usually called upon to define and assess clarity. The present article also offers a theoretical contribution to the ongoing re-flections on Italian as a pluricentric language. In particular, it suggests the need to observe not only the “langue”, but also how the language is used. In this regard, clarity seems to be a peculiarity of Swiss institutional communication in Italian that has its roots in historical, cultural and po-litical traditions.

This paper proposes a corpus-based analysis of the relation between Swiss Italian, a variety fostering the hypothesis of Italian as a pluricentric language, and Swiss institutional Italian, a variety considered pivotal as one of the main modelling sources of Swiss Italian. The linguistic and textual features of the latter variety have been investigated in the SNSF project It-Ist_CH L’italiano istituzionale svizzero. Analisi, valutazioni, prospettive developed at the University of Basel, whereas the features of Swiss Italian have been thoroughly described in a vast body of literature. One of the outcomes of previous studies is a list of 269 lexical items called “helvetisms”, presented in the Lessico di frequenza dell’italiano parlato della Svizzera italiana (LIPSI) on Swiss spoken Italian. The aim of the present research is to cross-reference the data on Swiss institutional Italian, represented in the It-Ist_CH corpus, with the list of helvetisms presented in the LIPSI, in order to define the relevance and pervasiveness – both from a quantitative and qualitative point of view – of the institutional variety in Swiss Italian.

In recent decades, several studies have been devoted to the comparison of regional varieties of Italian in Italian-speaking Switzerland with va-rieties spoken/written in Italy. In addition to language attitudes (cf. An-tonini & Moretti 2000), several linguistic peculiarities of Italian in Ital-ian-speaking Switzerland have been studied at all descriptive levels, i.e. phonetic, morphosyntactic (cf. Cerruti & Pandolfi 2015; Moretti 2011) and lexical (cf. Petralli 1991; Pandolfi 2009), as well as textual and pragmatic (cf. in this regard Ferrari 2009). The proposed research aims at analyzing a central variety of the Italian linguistic repertoire, namely neo-standard Italian (cf. Berruto 1987), still little studied from a Tici-nese-Italian contrastive point of view for oral and spontaneous produc-tions. On the basis of 30 semi-structured interviews (about 22 hours of audio recordings), given by 13 speakers from Ticino, 2 from Italian-speaking Grisons and 15 Italian speakers from different backgrounds, some salient morphosyntactic and syntactic features of neo-standard Italian, such as left dislocations (cf. Berruto 1985), the “che polivalente” (cf. Fiorentino 2007), the “ci attualizzante” (cf. Moretti 2004) or the use of progressive periphrasis (cf. Natale 2019) are examined. On the basis of quantitative analyses, we will try to determine whether the two groups diverge in terms of the frequency with which speakers resort to the characteristic features of the neostandard. Two scenarios can be hypothesized: either a scenario in which neostandard features are uni-formly distributed, confirming the continuity of the Italian-speaking linguistic space, or a scenario in which quantitative differences in the use of forms are observed, confirming a certain degree of autonomy in the development of the non-dominant variety regarding standard and neo-standard features (Pandolfi 2009).

The transitive constructions avere/esserci bisogno qualcosa (‘to have a need’/‘there is a need for something’) are frequently used by Swiss Italian speakers in the Canton of Ticino instead of the prepositional construction used in standard Italian of Italy avere/esserci bisogno di qualcosa, and are often recorded as a distinctive feature in descriptions of Swiss Italian. This article examines the syntax, the sociolinguistics and the territorial distribution of these constructions as well as their relationship with the dialects. The result is a complex phenomenon: these constructions appear to be part of a global grammaticalisation process shaped by conflicting tendencies. While they appear to originate from the Lombardy area, they also demonstrate a capacity for penetration that establishes them as an emerging feature of Italian as a whole. This makes it an interesting case study for broader reasoning about the state of Lombard regionalisms within the Swiss Italian norm, in a context of ‘weak’ pluricentrism that is characteristic of Italian in Switzerland.

As a result of the collaboration between the University of Applied Sci-ences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI) and the Linguistic Obser-vatory of Italian-speaking Switzerland (OLSI), the ‘Lexical Repertoire of School Usage Regionalisms in Italian-speaking Switzerland’ (‘RepSi’) pro-ject was launched in September 2021. The project arose from the need to develop a theoretical and practical framework for the use of the variety of Italian spoken in Italian-speaking Switzerland in schools and will lead to the publication of the ‘Repertory of Selected Terms of Italian-speaking Switzerland in School Usage’. This paper focuses on three entries from the Repertory: mappetta, foglio a brutta, and bocciare.

The topic of pluricentric languages is not new in the context of the multi-lingual region of South Tyrol, but it has typically only affected German and its position in the linguistic repertoire in relation to Italian, to the Tyrolean dialect and to the more prestigious standard varieties of Austria and Germany. However, it is legitimate to wonder whether even for the national language, Italian, the mere fact of being in the context of an offi-cially multilingual region, endowed with administrative autonomy, can-not have significant consequences on a sociolinguistic level, as regards its status and functions, but, in some way, also on the linguistic level. The paper will take into account the various factors that make Italian in South Tyrol a language with an anomalous status, simultaneously majority and minority language, in a context of asymmetric linguistic contact in which native, near-native and non-native varieties coexist with German and Tyrolean dialects.