L'italiano in contatto con il dialetto e altre lingue. Nuovi mezzi di comunicazione e nuove diglossie

This paper is concerned with variational aspects of SMS (i.e. text message) communication as a communicative mode that not only has become very popular over the last few years but is also supposed to have certain (and continuing) impacts on some of the constitutive parameters of communication as a whole (e.g. by re-evaluating the dichotomy between typically/traditional oral and written language conceptions). Based on collected material from the sms4science corpus this contribution elucidates some general intra- and extralinguistic features of the Italian subcorpus before focusing on language contact phenomena (involving Italian and other languages or dialectal varieties). Special attention is given to the emergence of what we consider a kind of 'new dialectality' (in the Italian speaking Switzerland), which is considered to be a result of ongoing processes of a restructuring of the repertoire and of the relation between the linguistic codes that are involved.