BergaWords: Crowdsourcing dialect data in Northern Italy with an Instagram profile

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 Abstract –

In recent years, data collection in linguistics has undergone a significant shift from the traditional face-to-face setting to remote; this trend predates the COVID-19 pandemic (Vaux 2003), but was further encouraged by it, resulting in the proliferation of web- and smartphone-based applications specifically designed to gather linguistic data from a great number of laypeople (Leemann et al. 2020, Hilton & Leemann 2021). Perhaps the field most affected by this shift so far has been language variation in space, or dialectology; this is not surprising, since, as Leemann et al. point out (2016), crowdsourcing was pioneered by linguistic geography already in the late 19th century, when Georg Wenker mailed questionnaires to schoolteachers all over the country for a linguistic atlas of Germany.
Although disfavored by cornerstone works such as the Atlas Linguistique de la France (ALF) and the Sprach- uns Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz (AIS), crowdsourcing? was picked up again by third-generation linguistic atlases like the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache (Elspaß & Möller 2003), the Atlante della lingua italiana quotidiana (Castellarin & Tosques 2015), VerbaAlpina (Krefeld & Lücke 2014) and the OurDialects project (MacKenzie et al. 2022).
This contribution aims to explore the opportunities and challenges that this approach brings about in the frame of a smaller case study of dialectal variation , by analyzing the results of surveys carried out on the Instagram account “Average Berghem Guy” (ABG), the self-proclaimed “first meme page about Bergamo”, one of the main urban centers in the northern Italian region of Lombardy. In this and many similar pages in the Italian social media landscape, dialects (it. dialetti), which are sister languages of Standard Italian and strongly geographically connotated (Dal Negro & Vietti 2011), are often a key component of characterizations of local identity (Masullo et al. 2021), and the online presence of dialetti has been studied as an environment for their preservation (Miola 2013).
Said surveys investigate lexical variation: for each surveyed item, the followers of ABG were directed to a GoogleDocs form embedded in Instagram stories, where they first had to indicate residence place in the Bergamo province and then answer to the question Come si dice …? (‘how do you say…?’), choosing among the alternatives provided or providing a new one. ABG was thus able to collect variants for 21 lexical items from nearly every municipality in the province. We then conducted a quantitative analysis of the distribution of the alternation rates using spatial autocorrelation, in the spirit of Grieve et al. (2011) and MacKenzie et al. (2022). Furthermore, we qualitatively examined in detail the patterns of single variants in terms of their concordance, or lack thereof, with those attested in traditional geolinguistic material, as well as the practical implications of theoretical choices such as the number of relevant lexical types, an important but often overlooked issue in dialectology (Regis 2019).