Abstract
The relative status of dialects and Italian and the different patterns of language
use have given rise to potentially different speech communities within the
larger Italo-Romance domain. Such communities are mainly determined by the
dimensions of geographical, social and age variation. In this paper we are going
to present some of these different patterns of dialect and standard Italian,
first reviewing some of the most relevant literature of the last two decades, and
then analyzing the most up-dated census results concerning language use.