Endangered Occitan varieties in Italy. Some microcontact effect on morphosyntax

This paper focuses on the Occitan varieties spoken in Italy from the perspective of language contact. The study investigates the Gallo-Romance colony of Guardia Piemontese (Calabria), examining this minority and endangered language. The methodology involves comparing data from two corpora, representing opposite ends of the continuum between a stable, conservative stage (older generation) and a stage involving younger speakers with strongly influenced by Italian. Current measures of language endangerment typically rely on external factors such as intergenerational language transmission, number of speakers, and linguistic domains of use. To explore changes in the internal structure of endangered languages, this study examines two marked syntactic structures: subject clitics and negation. The comparison aims to verify the mechanisms of “microcontact” and assess the stability of the morphosyntactic structures under external pressures.