Other than the expansion of the KIParla corpus, this project aims to build a tool for non-academic interlocutors (city institutions, immigration offices, schools, etc.) to orient themselves in the oral heritage, with a focus on the co-construction and communication of social categories (‘foreigners’, ‘immigrants’, ‘Italians’, ‘Arabs’, ‘citizens’, etc.) in and through spoken language uses. Spoken interaction is indeed at the same time a tool and place for social inclusion, and a more widespread awareness of the mechanisms and dynamics underlying the expression of social categories is crucial to improve intercultural communication and thus build a mature and welcoming society. Such tool will be named the Oral Compass and will be a multifunctional tool founded on the project results addressing the interests and necessities of those working in multicultural contexts.
The design and development of the Oral Compass will take several steps.
Firstly, the DiverSita team will review the professional and social needs of a variety of non-academic interlocutors. This information will serve as a basis to develop the Oral Compass. Overall the resources provided by the Oral Compass will help the users to understand and interpret with greater awareness the processes through which spoken Italian is used to convey meanings about cultural diversity, the speakers’ attitudes towards their own and others’ Italian varieties, views of Bologna and Torino as plurilingual landscapes, as well as how people co-construct and communicate social categories, such as “foreigners”, “migrants”, “co-citizens”, etc. in and through language. The features of the Oral Compass will strictly depend on both scientific results and analysis of needs, and are therefore difficult to anticipate in detail at this stage the resources.
However, the tool will foreseeably include:
1. Light-handed reports (with data visualizations and concrete examples) on specific topics. Possible titles and contents are the following: (A) “My and the others’ Italian languages”, collecting cases identified in the overall KIParla modules where speakers manifest their attitude towards varieties of Italian, including those relatively close to the standard, characterized by sociolinguistic variation, representing ethnolects of Italian spoken by foreign-origin citizens, and the so-called learner varieties of Italian. (B) “Me and my multicultural city”, where data report on the speakers’ thoughts, opinions, examples, and stands about Torino and Bologna as plurilingual landshaps. (C) “They vs us: what a slippery floor!”: this report may show how social categories are built in discourse and conversation, convey positive or negative stereotypes towards groups, change their meanings in the course of interactional exchanges, and provide information on how speakers position themselves within the groups they talk about. (D) “With Italian... All you need is time” could concentrate on how multilingual speakers describe their plurilingual repertoires; this report may pay particular attention to whether they position themselves as mainly speakers or vice versa learners of Italian.
2. Guidelines about how to use the project reports to design training sessions meant for specific professionals (health and social care professionals, teachers, etc.). A number of training paths will be exemplified by reorganizing the reports’ visualizations and examples according to specific target groups. Again, the nature, number, and contents of the guidelines will be defined during the project itself. To give just an example, professionals working for the national health system (nurses, doctors, office workers at help desks, etc.) may find useful combinations of data and information that overall shed light on how speakers describe their experiences with the city public services, address the issue of their own language skills when exposed to the varieties of Italian used in hospitals and by family doctors, or disclose cultural assumptions about health (e.g., what is well-being, who is in charge of it, what to do when a person does not feel well, etc.).
3. A vademecum describing how to use KIParla step by step, in order for the non-academic users to find relevant contents autonomously. This will be a very accessible video, which will showcase some functionalities for the KIParla interface for non-expert users.
4. A very special glossary, which will show the speakers’ definitions of specific words (e.g., “race”, “culture”, “integration”) as they appear in the corpus and compare them with the corresponding definitions provided in dictionaries and by recognised experts in social and language sciences. Its attractive format will make the project glossary a very effective tool especially in educational contexts, where awareness-raising activities about the importance of interculturally-competent language uses are pivotal.