Le lingue pluricentriche: il caso dell'italiano

Fifteen years after the first cautious proposals to consider the Italian-speaking community of Switzerland as to some degree autonomous in defining a linguistic norm, the pluricentric perspective on the language is now well established. This volume offers numerous insights, with contributions ranging from general and abstract considerations to presentations of studies and detailed analyses of specific linguistic phenomena, however all touching on certain central theoretical or methodological issues. The many issues highlighted cover, among others, the choice of criteria underlying the corpus design for analysing a geographical and political variety, identifying an Italian variety of reference for a contrastive approach to the Swiss variety or the theoretical implications of separating political and linguistic boundaries while observing areas of overlap and interdependence. The contributions essentially revolve around two central defining features of pluricentric languages: “statehood” and the distance between varieties.