Language Vitality and Digital Games
18 September 2023
From July 24th to 27th, 2023, I went to Luserna on behalf of the Trentino unit of the PRIN project AlpiLink (Alpine Languages in Contact) to assist with the questionnaire compilation scheduled as part of the new project.
Although AlpiLink is a digital platform that relies on the voluntary participation of informants for data collection through crowdsourcing, the involvement of a linguist in the research is crucial, especially in the early stages. In this way, speakers, besides enhancing their motivation to contribute, can seek expert guidance for resolving doubts regarding the questions posed and the answers to provide, as well as to effectively navigate the website’s infrastructure.
The first day of the survey was devoted to getting acquainted. I had the opportunity to meet the members of the Kulturinstitut Lusérn, who immediately started searching for informants after receiving detailed explanations about the data collection goals and features.
From July 25th to 27th, the actual linguistic survey was conducted at the Kulturinstitut Lusérn. The total number of participants was twelve, equally divided between 6 males (M) and 6 females (F), with ages ranging from 17 to 75 years. According to arithmetic calculation, the average age for males was 43.83 years and for females was 47.33 years.
A balanced allocation of informants by gender and age group will permit a thorough evaluation of potential diageneric and diagenerational variation phenomena at the moment of linguistic analysis. Concentrating on this context, our attention is directed towards presenting first “caught impressions” from our observations of the participants’ responses.
Foremost, it is important to note that there were no significant differences in the response percentages of the speakers to the various tasks. Generally, the questionnaire was finished by the speakers through spoken samples for each stimulation cue. Despite this trend, some younger interlocutors, however, left a few translation tasks unfinished, particularly when they came across challenging words to find a Cimbrian equivalent for in the sentences to be translated (consider “aiuola” present in stimulation cue S02 “Zappa quest’aiuola, l’altra falla dopo”). Observing these examples, I noticed uncertainties even among the older speakers. It could be deduced that the maintenance of inter-generational language transmission is at a quite high standard. The grammatical competence of individuals under the age of <30 is almost indistinguishable from that of older informants.
In terms of how the minority language is used, it is important to highlight that 7 speakers have reported utilizing Cimbrian in written form. This is particularly evident in their informal interactions with relatives and/or friends via messaging apps like WhatsApp and Messenger. However, it’s important to note that only 3 speakers, all over > 50 years old, have claimed to write in Cimbrian in both formal and informal situations. In contrast, among the two younger interlocutors, one stated that they rarely write in Cimbrian, while the other never uses it in written form. The picture aligns with AlpiLink investigations on other minority languages like Ladin, Occitan, and Tyrolean and it does not contradict the results of the CLaM 2021 survey on Cimbrian’s written usage practices. The fact that only 32% of respondents in the CLaM survey can write in Cimbrian does not imply that other community members never use their language in written form. A more likely scenario is that in most cases, speakers of Cimbrian, even if they do not know the spelling rules, they have the ability to represent it graphically, although not always with precision and only in a few informal situations.
Finally, concerning the other languages included in their individual repertoire, 7 out of 12 speakers have confirmed their familiarity with the “Trentino dialect”. The Cimbrians use this term to refer to central Trentino, specifically to the varieties of Lavarone, Levico, and Caldonazzo, which are historical and geographical closely related to the area where Cimbrian is spoken. Rarely do Cimbrian speakers use these varieties in conversations with each other. Since the community demonstrates both active and passive competence in Italian, the emergence of trilingualism is evident. In this linguistic landscape, Italian assumes the acrolect position, while Cimbrian and Romance dialects are situated in the lower end of the repertoire.
Michele Cosentino
