Italian and German in contact: some macro- and microsociolinguistic observations in Alto Adige (South Tyrol)

South Tyrol represents an interesting field of research for contact linguistics, both for the remarkable linguistic and sociolinguistic vitality of the German community (which counts a wide range of different dialects and stylistic varieties in its repertoire) and for the presence of different sociolinguistic scenarios in its area, with as much different contact situations and phenomena. This paper aims at presenting the complexity of the sociolinguistic context of South Tyrol, combining observations on two different levels: on the one hand, the general sociolinguistic situation, the language attitudes and the functions assigned to the
different codes in contact; on the other hand, the typology of contact phenomena emerging in bilingual speech.