Abstract
In this essay the possible points of intersection between different areas of linguistics will be investigated: language documentation, language contact and applied linguistics. The idea is that languages that are typically the subject of language documentation projects are in-herently contact languages and that language contact should become an integral part of language revitalization projects. Starting from a series of case studies that are related to the German-speaking communities in Italy, I will consider the different strategies for the adap-tation of verbal borrowings used productively by minority language speakers to cope with the inevitable processes of language shift. An accurate analysis of these mechanisms makes it possible to observe the internal vitality of language systems and eventually to exploit them in a perspective of language planning.