Vol. 1 (2025)
Oral Data Production

Towards an Oral Corpus for Heritage Piedmontese

PDF
  • Eugenio Goria,
  • Fabio Gasparini
Eugenio Goria
Università di Torino, Italy
Fabio Gasparini
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/oar-3337

Published 2025-02-24

Keywords

  • oral data production,
  • heritage language,
  • Piedmontese

How to Cite

Goria, E., & Gasparini, F. (2025). Towards an Oral Corpus for Heritage Piedmontese. Oral Archives Journal, 1, 35–55. https://doi.org/10.36253/oar-3337

Copyright (c) 2025 Eugenio Goria, Fabio Gasparini

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This paper presents the creation of an oral corpus as part of the ongoing PILAR project (Piedmontese Language in Argentina, 2019 – present), focused on the linguistic and ethnographic documentation of Piedmontese (Italo-Romance) as a heritage language in Argentina. The project gathers linguistic autobiographies and video recordings of grassroots initiatives that either actively use Piedmontese or reference cultural elements from Piedmont, such as music, folk songs, and traditional cuisine. Piedmontese has been spoken in Argentina since the late 19th century, when the government encouraged European migration to support agricultural development in the central provinces of Córdoba, Santa Fe, and Entre Ríos. High numbers of Piedmontese-speaking migrants and the isolation of these communities from urban centres allowed the language to persist longer than other Italian dialects in Argentina. As language shift eventually occurred, a revival movement emerged in Argentina, inspired by similar efforts in the Piedmont region. This paper details the corpus, its contents, and its significance in preserving Piedmontese as a living cultural and linguistic heritage in Argentina.

PDF

References

  1. Aalberse, Suzanne, Ad Backus, and Pieter Muysken. 2019. Heritage Languages: A Language Contact Approach. Studies in Bilingualism, Vol. 58. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.58.
  2. Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2007. “Linguistic Fieldwork: Setting the Scene.” STUF – Language Typology and Universals, 60(1): 3-11. https://doi.org/10.1524/stuf.2007.60.1.3.
  3. Auer, Peter. 1999. “From Codeswitching via Language Mixing to Fused Lects: Toward a Dynamic Typology of Bilingual Speech.” International Journal of Bilingualism, 3(4): 309-32. https://doi.org/10.1177/13670069990030040101.
  4. Austin, Peter K. 2006. “Data and Language Documentation.” In Essentials of Language Documentation, edited by Jost Gippert, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, and Ulrike Mosel, 87-112. Boston: de Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110197730.87.
  5. Azar, Zeynep, Ad Backus, and Aslı Özyürek. 2020. “Language Contact Does Not Drive Gesture Transfer: Heritage Speakers Maintain Language Specific Gesture Patterns in Each Language.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 23(2): 414-28. https://doi.org/10.1017/S136672891900018X.
  6. Bagna, Carla. 2011. “America Latina.” In Storia linguistica dell’emigrazione italiana nel mondo, edited by Massimo Vedovelli, 305–58. Rome: Carocci.
  7. Benmamoun, Elabbas, Silvina Montrul, and Maria Polinsky. 2013. “Heritage Languages and Their Speakers: Opportunities and Challenges for Linguistics.” Theoretical Linguistics, 39(3-4). https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2013-0009.
  8. Berruto, Gaetano. 2005. “Dialect/Standard Convergence, Mixing, and Models of Language Contact: The Case of Italy.” In Dialect Change, edited by Peter Auer, Frans Hinskens, and Paul Kerswill, 1st ed., 81-95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486623.005.
  9. Berruto, Gaetano. 2017. Sociolinguistica dell’italiano contemporaneo. Nuova edizione, 2a edizione. Manuali universitari Linguistica 131. Rome: Carocci.
  10. Bettoni, Camilla, and John Gibbons. 1988. “Linguistic Purism and Language Shift: A Guise-Voice Study of the Italian Community in Sydney.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 1988(72). https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl.1988.72.15.
  11. Bickel, Balthasar, Bernard Comrie, and Martin Haspelmath. 2008. “Leipzig Glossing Rules: Conventions for Interlinear Morpheme-by-Morpheme Glosses.” Online manuscript. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php.
  12. Blommaert, Jan, and Jie Dong. 2010. Ethnographic Fieldwork: A Beginner’s Guide. Bristol; Buffalo: Multilingual Matters.
  13. Brero, Camillo, and Remo Bertodatti. 1988. Grammatica della lingua piemontese: Parola, vita, letteratura. Turin: Edizione “Piemont/Europa.”
  14. Buchstaller, Isabelle, and Ghada Khattab. 2014. “Population Samples.” In Research Methods in Linguistics, edited by Robert J. Podesva and Devyani Sharma, 1st ed., 74-95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139013734.006.
  15. Carroll, Stephanie Russo, Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear, and Andrew Martinez. 2019. “Indigenous Data Governance: Strategies from United States Native Nations.” Data Science Journal, 18(1): 31. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2019-031.
  16. Clyne, Michael. 2003. Dynamics of Language Contact: English and Immigrant Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511606526.
  17. Dal Negro, Silvia. 2013. “Dealing with Bilingual Corpora: Parts of Speech Distribution and Bilingual Patterns.” Revue Française de Linguistique Appliquée, 18(2): 15-28.
  18. De Mauro, Tullio. 1963. Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita. Biblioteca storica Laterza. Rome: Laterza.
  19. Devoto, Fernando. 2006. Storia degli Italiani in Argentina. Rome: Donzelli.
  20. Djenderedjian, Julio César. 2008. “La Colonización Agrícola En Argentina, 1850-1900: Problemas y Desafíos de Un Complejo Proceso de Cambio Productivo En Santa Fe y Entre Ríos.” América Latina En La Historia Económica, 15(2): 127.
  21. Eckert, Penelope. 2000. Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High. Language in Society, 27. Malden: Blackwell Publishers.
  22. Fishman, Joshua. 1966. “Language Maintenance and Language Shift: The American Immigrant Case within a General Theoretical Perspective.” Sociologus, 16(1): 19-39.
  23. Garcia, Guilherme D., and Natália Brambatti Guzzo. 2023. “A Corpus-Based Approach to Map Target Vowel Asymmetry in Brazilian Veneto Metaphony.” Italian Journal of Linguistics, 35(1): 115-38. https://doi.org/10.26346/1120-2726-205.
  24. Gasparini, Fabio and Eugenio Goria. In preparation. Heritage languages and acts of identity: the case of Piedmontese migrants in Argentina. Manuscript.
  25. Giolitto, Marco. 2000. “Pratiche linguistiche e rappresentazioni della comunità piemontese d’Argentina.” Éducation et Sociétés Plurilingues, 9: 13-19.
  26. Giolitto, Marco. 2010. La Communauté Piemontaise d’Argentine: Evolution, Fonction et Image Du Piemontais Dans La Pampa Gringa Argentine. München: Martin Meidenbauer Verlagsbuchhandlung.
  27. Goria, Eugenio. 2012. “Il dialetto nella comunicazione commerciale: Il caso torinese”. RID: Rivista italiana di dialettologia, 36: 129-49.
  28. Goria, Eugenio. 2015. “Il piemontese di Argentina. Considerazioni generali e analisi di un caso”. Rivista Italiana di Dialettologia, Lingue Dialetti e Società, 39: 127-58.
  29. Goria, Eugenio. 2023. “Il piemontese in Argentina. Aspetti linguistici ed etnografici”. In Confini nelle lingue e tra le lingue, edited by Daniela Mereu and Silvia Dal Negro, 219-35. Milan: Officinaventuno.
  30. Goria, Eugenio, and Fabio Gasparini. 2023 [Film]. Pilar. Piedmontese Language in Argentina. Italy.
  31. Grosjean, François. 2012. “Bilingual and Monolingual Language Modes.” In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, edited by Carol A. Chapelle, 1st ed. Hoboken: Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0090.
  32. Haig, Jeoffrey, and Stefan Schnell. 2023. “Multi-CAST: Multilingual Corpus of Annotated Spoken Texts.” Bamberg: University of Bamberg. https://multicast.aspra.uni-bamberg.de.
  33. Kilani, Mondher. 2000. L’invention de l’autre: essais sur le discours anthropologique. Repr. Anthropologie. Lausanne: Payot.
  34. Kung, Susan Smythe. 2020. “Data Archiving, Access, and Repatriation.” In The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, edited by James Stanlaw, 1st ed., 1-4. Hoboken: Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118786093.iela0430.
  35. Labov, William. 1984. “Field Methods of the Project on Linguistic Change and Variation”. In Language in Use, edited by John Baugh and Joel Sherzer, 28-52. NJ: Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs.
  36. Mereu, Daniela. 2019. Il sardo parlato a Cagliari: Una ricerca sociofonetica. Materiali Linguistici, 80. Milan: Franco Angeli.
  37. Mereu, Daniela. 2022. “Documentazione linguistica e studio della variazione sociolinguistica: Il caso delle varietà dialettali in via di estinzione.” In Per una pianificazione del plurilinguismo in Sardegna, edited by Daniela Marzo, Simone Pisano, and Maurizio Virdis, 127-45. Cagliari: Condaghes.
  38. Mettouchi, Amina, and Christian Chanard. 2010. “From Fieldwork to Annotated Corpora: The CorpAfroAs Project.” Faits de Langues, 35-36(2): 255-65. https://doi.org/10.1163/19589514-035-036-02-900000011.
  39. Milroy, James, and Lesley Milroy. 1997. “Network Structure and Linguistic Change.” In Sociolinguistics, edited by Nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski, 199-211. London: Macmillan Education UK. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25582-5_17.
  40. Miola, Emanuele, and Nicola Duberti. 2022. “Sulla testualità degli elaborati scritti del laboratorio di piemontese dell’Università di Torino.” Bollettino dell’Atlante Linguistico Italiano, 46: 161–80.
  41. Moseley, Christopher, ed. 2007. Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages. London: Routledge.
  42. Nagy, Naomi. 2020. “HLVC Transcriptions and Recordings.” Borealis.
  43. Nagy, Naomi, and Miriam Meyerhoff. 2015. “Extending ELAN into Variationist Sociolinguistics.” Linguistics Vanguard, 1(1): 271-81. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2015-0012.
  44. Nascimbene, Mario C. 1987. “Storia della collettività italiana in Argentina (1835-1965).” In La popolazione di origine italiana in Argentina, edited by Francis Korn, 209–504. Turin: Fondazione Agnelli.
  45. Olivier de Sardan, Jean-Pierre. 1995. “La Politique du terrain: Sur la production des données en anthropologie.” Enquête, 1(October), 71-109. https://doi.org/10.4000/enquete.263.
  46. Polinsky, Maria. 2018. Heritage Languages and Their Speakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  47. Polinsky, Maria, and Gregory Scontras. 2020. “Understanding Heritage Languages.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 23(1): 4-20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000245.
  48. Raschieri, Guido. 2019. “The Museo del Paesaggio Sonoro (Riva presso Chieri, Turin)”. Etnografie sonore/Sound Ethnographies, 2(1): 155-169.
  49. Regis, Riccardo. 2011. “Koinè dialettale, dialetto di Koinè, Processi di Koinizzazione.” Rivista Italiana di Dialettologia, Lingue Dialetti e Società, 35: 7-36.
  50. Regis, Riccardo, and Matteo Rivoira. 2019. “‘L’anello che non tiene’: Ai margini di un sistema ortografico.” Lengas, 86(November). https://doi.org/10.4000/lengas.3318.
  51. Rießler, Michael, and Joshua Wilbur. 2017. “Documenting Endangered Oral Histories of the Arctic: A Proposed Symbiosis for Language Documentation and Oral History Research, Illustrated by Saami and Komi Examples.” In Oral History Meets Linguistics, edited by Erich Kasten, Katja Martina Roller, and Joshua Karl Wilbur, 31-64. SEC Publications Exhibitions and Symposia. Fürstenberg: Kulturstiftung Sibirien.
  52. Rothman, Jason. 2009. “Understanding the Nature and Outcomes of Early Bilingualism: Romance Languages as Heritage Languages.” International Journal of Bilingualism, 13(2): 155-63. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006909339814.
  53. Schmid, Monika. 2011. Language attrition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  54. Sloetjes, Han, and Peter Wittenburg. 2008. “Annotation by Category: ELAN and ISO DCR.” In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’08), edited by Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, and Daniel Tapias. Marrakech: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
  55. Sorace, Antonella. 2011. “Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilingualism”. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1(1): 1-33. https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.1.1.01sor.
  56. Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2006. Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation. 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511801624.
  57. Tosco, Mauro, Emanuele Miola, and Nicola Duberti. 2023. A Grammar of Piedmontese: A Minority Language of Northwest Italy. Grammars and Sketches of the World’s Languages. Leiden: Brill.
  58. Turchetta, Barbara. 2005. Il mondo in italiano: varietà e usi internazionali della lingua. 1. ed. Manuali Laterza, 220. Rome: Laterza.
  59. Vedovelli, Massimo. 2011. Storia linguistica dell’emigrazione italiana nel mondo. 1a ed. Studi Superiori, 641. Rome: Carocci.
  60. Villata, Bruno. 2009. La lingua piemontese: fonologia, morfologia, sintassi, formazione delle parole. Turin: Savej.