DiverSIta. Diversity in Spoken ITalian

An important part of cultural heritage is represented by the complex and diverse set of linguistic resources used in every-day spoken communication, to which we refer as oral heritage. Compared to written language, the documentation of oral heritage poses a number of difficulties, part of which arise from the great variability of spoken language and can be seen as a reflection of diversity in society. The DiversITa project aims to develop a digital resource documenting the transforming nature of the oral Italian heritage, with a focus on the urban contexts of Bologna and Torino, in the belief that a better representation of the diversity subsumed in spoken Italian may be a crucial step towards a more inclusive society, that is one able to represent the diversity of its individuals. This goal will be achieved by expanding an already existing corpus of spoken Italian (KIParla, www.kiparla.it), with new modules that will make it representative 1) of the diverse constellation of speakers of Italian, without aprioristic assumptions on their linguistic and sociological backgrounds, and 2) of the varieties of Italian that are spoken by these individuals, including underrepresented ones (e.g. sociolects of groups with minor educational achievements, learner varieties and ethnolects of Italian spoken within communities of speakers with an international migration background). At the end of the project we expect to have an open-access, modular, incremental, replicable resource including six modules (KIP, ParlaTO, PArlaBO, KIPasti, Stra-PArlaTO and Stra-ParlaTO), for a total of 310 h of transcribed recordings, aligned with audio, and searchable through ad-hoc queries thanks to metadata-based filters. The whole process and methodology will be documented, making it fully accessible and replicable also for other languages in and outside Europe, in compliance with the FAIR principles. Directly connected to the achievement of this goal is the second objective of the DiverSIta project. Thanks to the analysis of oral data, we will design an ORAL COMPASS, namely, a tool for non-academic interlocutors (city institutions, immigration offices, schools, etc.) to orient themselves in the multifaceted processes that characterize spoken language, in particular those practices leading to the co-construction and communication of social categories in and through language. Oral Compass will provide guidelines and visual instruments designed for people working in cross-cultural contexts, to interpret with greater awareness the processes through which social actors construct and convey specific social categories (e.g. “foreigners”, vs “migrants”, “newcomers”, etc.). We expect the Oral Compass to have a crucial impact on the dynamics of social inclusion, thanks to the active involvement of local institutions, who will participate in the design of the resource and will be guided through a process of uptake and implementation of the research results and recommendations.