Italian dialects and language contact

In this short introduction to the Special Issue of Isogloss, dedicated to language contact involving Italian dialects, we show that the study of the non-standard varieties of Italy has a great heuristic potential, which is at least threefold: (i) typological; (ii) analytical-theoretical; (iii) sociolinguistic. Using the example of Lurese, a Logudorese Sardinian enclave within the Gallurese-speaking territory, we demonstrate furthermore that language contact within Italy may even give rise to typological rara, even absolute rara, i.e. phenomena that are found rarely across language families or even, as in the case discussed here, phenomena that have never been described for any other language (this is the case for gender marking on third person pronouns, also in the non-singular, only for disambiguation in Lurese). The rest of this brief chapter introduces the contributions gathered in this Special Issue.