Lecture:
Spoken Italian - a sociolinguistic and linguistic profile

Ms Silvia Dal Negro

4:30 - 6:20pm
30 April, 2013 (Tue)
CPD 2.16,Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus

Because of its peculiar origins as a literary language used by a highly cultivated elite, Standard Italian has gained a vast population of native speakers and a large variety of written and spoken domains only very recently, in the course of the 20th century together with the rapid demise of local dialects. This means that the new standard language is now changing more rapidly than it has done in the past, since its origins in the 11th-12th centuries. In the presentation several aspects that are typical of spoken Italian will be discussed and explained in terms of regionalization, popularization and oralization trends.

Silvia Dal Negro is Associate Professor in Linguistics at the Free University of Bolzano/Bozen. She teaches Linguistic education, Sociolinguistics and Contact Linguistics at the Faculty of Education. Her main research interests are in the domains of the sociolinguistics of Italy and contact linguistics focussing in particular on bilingualism and minority languages.

All are welcome. For enquiries, please contact Ms Nadia Camporese at nadcam@hku.hk