Nome di battesimo e articolo espletivo – crowdsourcing e cartografica linguistica nello studio della variazione linguistica in Trentino-Alto Adige e Veneto

Personal names exhibit specific linguistic features that make them valuable for linguistic research as a diagnostic tool. In both German and Italian, article usage with personal names is governed by distinct syntactic and pragmatic factors, displaying significant geographic variation. In the standard languages bare personal names are not accompanied by articles whereas in many dialects they are, cf. È arrivato Gianni/Hans ist gekommen vs. È arrivato il Gianni/Der Hans ist gekommen ‘John arrived’. Proper nouns in general are considered the final stage in the grammaticalization process of the definite article. This last step seems to be accomplished in the dialects in the south of the German-speaking area and in the north of the adjacent Italian-speaking area, particularly in the multilingual region of Trentino-South Tyrol, in which German, Italian and Ladin varieties are intermingled in many speakers’ individual repertoires. The large amount of data collected with the crowdsourcing platform VinKo (‘Varieties in Contact’,) makes it possible to create detailed maps with a high geographic resolution. These maps show a peak of article usage immediately north and south of the German-Italian language border in the Adige valley, followed by a continuous decrease in the frequency of article usage towards the south. Hence, it appears that language contact across the language border facilitates the emergence of highly corresponding distributional patterns at both sides of the border. These patterns are in contrast with significant differences observed between dialects of the same language located in non-adjacent areas (e.g., frequent article usage in the Italian dialects in central Trentino vs. rare article usage in the Italian dialects in Verona’s southern plains).