Sociolinguistic aspects and language contact: Evidence from Francoprovençal of Apulia

The aim of this paper is to investigate two Francoprovençal communities in the Italian region of Apulia, Faeto and Celle di St. Vito. Despite the short distance between the two towns, and their common isolation from other Francoprovençal communities, their sociolinguistic conditions are deeply different. They differ in reference to the functional distribution of the languages of the repertoire and speakers’ language uses, and in reference to the degree of permeability of Francoprovençal varieties towards Italian and its dialects. The repertoire composition and the relationship between the codes have a key role both for minority language maintenance and for language contact processes, creating the starting point for their development. In this perspective, I analysed language contact phenomena in a sample of speakers discourse. I report correlations between the choice of different code mixing strategies and three sociolinguistic variables (age, sex and village), but not with occupation.