Abstract

The talk will focus on a perspective of dialectological research that, starting from fieldwork techniques and a structural description of linguistic phenomena especially considered in their variable patterns, moves towards projects of a “linguistic echology of small communities”. Over a period of twenty years, the ADICA project research team at the University of Naples Federico II has built up an archive of the dialects of Campania that includes sound records, photographs and films with interviews of numerous speakers and other kinds of data (records of ethnographical data, like objects and artefacts of everyday life, photographs and films of landscapes, particularly interesting cultural settings of the various communities investigated, etc.).

The geographical space covered by the work and projects of the ADICA group includes both the coastal and the hinterland of Campania, the administrative region that has Naples as its main city. Like other areas of Southern Italy, Campania is more conservative than the North in terms of dialect preservation, but it is experiencing threats to the traditional linguistic environment in which dialects once flourished. It has also suffered from massive emigration, especially in its internal mountainous territories, due to their precarious economic condition.

The perspective of linguistic echology aims at (i) direct and deep knowledge of the linguistic, social and cultural aspects of the communities investigated; (ii) preservation of the communities’ linguistic and cultural feeling and memory as an overall heritage in the complex conditions of a changing world, in order to help keep the social habitat alive and balanced; (iii) promotion of the communities’ overall heritage with the communicative techniques of on-line museums, documentaries, and exhibitions.