Abstract
This paper presents a case study on a multilingual municipality located at the southern border of the (German-Italian) bilingual region of South Tyrol, in Northern Italy. On the basis of recent sociolinguistic and linguistic data, as well as historical documentation, different models of sociolinguistic repertoires have been proposed and discussed. Eventually, the most suitable model that can reflect the sociolinguistic situation is that of an almost perfect mono-communitarian bilingualism in which both the Italian and the German components include the standard and a local dialect variety (Trentino and Tyrolean, respectively). We argue that it is in particular the presence of these dialects that has provided a shared sociolinguistic space where the speech communities have had the opportunity to interact on a balanced basis and to develop both a generalized bilingualism and the emergence of linguistically mixed varieties. The main part of this research is based on a sample of 122 respondents to a sociolinguistic questionnaire (corresponding to 4.5% of the entire population) which targeted all individuals belonging to one single age group (those in their early 20s) and through them their older relatives (parents and grandparents). This research method has favoured an intergenerational outline of the speech community and a family-based perspective in language use and preferences. Linguistic data, on the other hand, derive from a corpus of spontaneous and semi-spontaneous conversations recorded within the community, attesting a variety of monolingual and bilingual speech.