§03§ §12§ §16§Topic of this volume is Pomattertitsch, a German dialect which is doomed to extinction. This Allemanic (Walser) dialect is spoken at Formazza, a tiny Alpine community in Italy, and after centuries of semi-secluded existence is now undergoing major transformations due to the rapidly declining number of its speakers and the limited range of its functions. Within the framework of language decay and death this analysis focuses on phenomena of linguistic variation at a morphosyntactic level. This comprehensive study includes a large body of spoken data collected from informants of different age groups and with different levels of language fluency and thus displays a unique picture of an endangered language. §02§The Author: Silvia Dal Negro, born in Zürich in 1968, teaches Linguistics at the Università del Piemonte Orientale and conducts research on minority languages, dialects and language contact in northern Italy. Her research interests also include phenomena of language contact and acquisition in Switzerland and multilingualism in Italy.
