ABSTRACT
This chapter is organized into two main sections: the first, sociolinguistics of language, encompasses linguistic variation within the Italo-Romance domain, and the second, sociolinguistics of society, deals with the sociolinguistic dynamics observed within the Italian speech community. The chapter takes into account both current trends in research, due to the adoption of new methodological and theoretical paradigms and to the recent availability of corpora of spoken Italian, and up-to-date trends in society as regards the relationship of the standard language and the dialects and old (autochthonous) and new (immigrant) minority languages. Among the new trends that are presented in our survey one can mention convergence phenomena in regional Italian varieties, both in the sense of vertical (substandard-standard) and horizontal (supra-regional) convergence, the renovated interest in the study of Italo-Romance as a heritage language out of Italy, the attention to the written domains of language use.
