Bilingualism and contact-induced change in Cimbrian: possessive constructions

The so-called "German-language islands" in Northern Italy nowadays exhibit an extremely unbalanced bilingualism with Italian being always the dominant language in the speakers' repertoires and, hence, a laboratory situation for studying to what extent language contact can induce language change in the minority ("replica") language. This article reconstructs the development of bilingualism in the Cimbrian area since late medieval times and correlates the different types of bilingualism with the language change in constructions with possessive elements, attested in historical language documentation. It turns out that Cimbrian adopts the Italian features of the possessive constructions as far as they are compatible with the principles and typological possibilities of German morphosyntax.