Abstract
Recent revivals of local cultures and languages, as well as ideologically-loaded debates on the role of dialects at school usually ignore the fact that the scientific study of dialects and of closely related systems can be very interesting for a theory of language and also in the domain of linguistic education. In particular, dialects provide larger sets of variants and of variant combinations that can become relevant in the definition of typological variation. Even when their linguistic “substance” is quite similar, dialects display different forms of linguistic patterning and of fine-grained variation. Focusing on the Romance-Germanic contact area encompassing the alpine space, patterns of variation in the inflectional behaviour of numerals will be considered. This topic provides a good example of dialects exhibiting a higher degree of complexity than most European standard languages.