The DiversITa project aims to develop a digital resource documenting the transforming nature of the oral Italian heritage, to achieve a better representation of underrepresented varieties like those used by speakers with multilingual backgrounds and a migration history. This will allow to analyse and understand the role played by linguistic practices in the patterns of cultural inclusion and exclusion characterizing contemporary urban multi-cultural societies (Blommaert 2013). The project, as a matter of fact, aims to improve human well-being in urban contexts through actions in line with Subcluster 4, dedicated to the development of innovative research on European cultural heritage.
This goal will be achieved by expanding an already existing corpus of spoken Italian (KIParla) towards a radically innovative direction. The new modules will make the corpus representative, on the one hand, of the diverse constellation of speakers of Italian, without aprioristic assumptions on their linguistic and sociological backgrounds, and on the other hand, of the varieties of Italian spoken by these individuals. These include varieties that are generally underrepresented, e.g. sociolects of groups characterized by minor educational achievements, learner varieties and ethnolects of Italian spoken within communities of SIMB (Speaker with an International Migration Background; see Background for more details). We argue, in fact, that this complex and dynamic set of linguistic resources and social practices represents an important part of Italian oral heritage and significant actions must be taken towards its documentation over time.
The development of the KIParla corpus towards the ambitious goal of being the first resource broadly representing variation in Spoken Italian will start by the completion and publication of two modules that are under construction at the moment (while data collection is completed, transcriptions and pseudonymization are still in progress): KIPasti e ParlaBO. The addition of these two modules crucially leads to a wider representativity of the KIParla corpus, which will then include a greater variation of registers and communicative contexts (diaphasic varieties), a great variation of speakers, in terms of socio-demographic characteristics (diastratic varieties) and in terms of geographic origins (diatopic varieties).
The core of the innovative potential of the project lies in the development of two completely new modules focused on SIMB varieties, with data collected in the urban contexts of Bologna and Torino (see Methodology for more details on the data collection). These two modules aim at representing varieties of Italian spoken within communities of foreign origin with complex multilingual repertoires.
From a sociolinguistic perspective, this will set the conditions to describe SIMB varieties within the sociolinguistic frame of the Italian system; from an SLA perspective, gathering data of unsupervised speech is of paramount importance and could allow the characteristics of these varieties to emerge in their entirety, both infra-varietistically and multi linguistically.
Connected to the achievement of these goals is the second objective of the DiverSIta project. Thanks to the analysis of the new oral data, we will design an Oral Compass, namely a tool for non-academic interlocutors (city institutions, immigration offices, schools, etc.) (see Oral Compass for more details).