Abstract
The article provides a preliminary description of the patterns of language use and their relation to the strategies of language contact in a multilingual context. The analysis is based on a corpus of sociolinguistic data collected at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano by two university students. The corpus consists of both audio recordings of spontaneous students' verbal interactions and language diaries (written self-recordings of daily language use). These two different empirical sources are investigated in order to outline (a) a chart of language use in situation and (b) a description of language contact phenomena. Language diaries proved to be useful to draw a map of speakers' language choices in relation to their social networks and, on the other hand, verbal data were the basis for the exploratory analysis on language contact strategies (eg bilingual mode, native-non native communication, communication among non native speakers)