Abstract
The paper deals with the role played by bilingual discourse in the process of linguistic erosion and language shift in the context of endangered minority languages that have been spoken within the Italian borders for at least 500 years (in some cases up to eight centuries). Because of their very long history of contact and of the great asymmetries within their linguistic repertoires, language minorities make up a perfect test to verify some crucial and problematic aspects of codeswitching theory and analysis, and to explore its explicative power. Both functional and formal features will be considered. In particular, the relationship between syntactic convergence and constraints of codemixing, and between codemixing and borrowing and hybridisms will be dealt with. On the basis of the data commented throughout the paper, I will argue that there is none single path leading from bilingual conversation to language death. Instead, a varied range of outcomes seems to emerge, thus confirming the complex link connecting sociolinguistic context and linguistic consequences.