KONTATTO: A laboratory for the study of language contact in South Tyrol

Between 2011 and 2019 two research projects were financed by the Autonomous Province of Bozen-Bolzano (South Tyrol, Italy) that allowed a research group led by the two authors to be set up to work extensively on language contact. One of the major outcomes of these two research projects was the creation of a corpus of spoken Tyro-lean (KONTATTO) and of a few other secondary corpora (KONTATTI) devoted to Italo-Romance dialects, as well as Cimbrian and Ladin. At present, these datasets constitute an open lab aimed at further investigating language contact and experimenting methods of handling spontaneous speech. The studies carried out so far are characterized by a corpus-based approach, highlighting the importance of frequency and, more generally, of use in language contact.These research projects explored