Language variety as a linguistic subsystem: typological implications

This paper emphasizes the importance of language variety in typological linguistics and its role in understanding inter- and intralingual variation. Adopting a corpus-based perspective, the paper explores the covariation structure that links linguistic phenomena and social information, revealing distinct linguistic subsystems within a language. Two case studies of sociolinguistic variation in Italian illustrate how language varieties emerging from the data can carry micro-typological meaning. The first study empirically tests the co-existence of ‘neo-standard Italian’ and the traditional literary standard in speakers’ usage, while the second is a phonological analysis of the allophony of /r/ in Italian spoken by a bilingual community in South Tyrol (Italy). The analysis indicates that the integration of language varieties into typological research allows for a more complex representation of the hierarchical structure of linguistic phenomena.