One Language fits all? The spectacular case of multilingual Italy with Luigi Andriani (Seminar no. 25)

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ONE LANGUAGE FITS ALL?

THE SPECTACULAR CASE OF MULTILINGUAL ITALY

Speaker: Prof. Luigi Andriani (Universität Hamburg)

• Date: Wednesday, 10 June 2026
• Time: 17:00 (5:00 PM) Central European Summer Time (CEST / Rome Time)
• Platform: Zoom Online
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Abstract

Do Italians only speak Italian as their native language? Certainly not, contrary to many common beliefs and even official data from the European Union, in which each language roughly corresponds to a single country. Linguistic and geopolitical borders, however, rarely match.

Throughout its history, the Italian peninsula has hosted a vast range of linguistic diversity, both developed indigenously or imported within its borders. As is well known, the varieties of Latin spoken across Europe led to the development of the early Romance languages. In Italy, this process of linguistic diversification gradually gave rise to the numerous romance varieties that are still spoken nowadays in Italy as sister languages to Italian, the so-called dialetti (dialects), thereby creating a multilingual scenario which still remains unparalleled in the European context.

In this talk, the spectacular case of multilingual Italy will be explored through the lens of recent fieldwork experience in Italy and in heritage Italian communities abroad, and understood according to the main axes of (socio)linguistic variation: time, space, social variables, medium, and register.

About the Speaker

Luigi Andriani is Junior Professor of Italian and Spanish Linguistics at the University of Hamburg, Germany. His research focuses on the comparison of grammatical phenomena across contemporary and historical non-standard Romance varieties. He has worked extensively on various aspects of the syntax of Barese, the local variety spoken in the city of Bari (Italy), as well as on the syntax of “heritage” Italo-Romance varieties currently spoken in the Americas. He has published widely on both topics.

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