Catalan in Alghero as a Mix of Archaism and Innovation: Dynamics of Linguistic Contact with Italian, Sardinian and Other Idiomatic Varieties

The town of Alghero represents a privileged area of research to explore the mechanisms of language
evolution and the changes due to the contact with other linguistic varieties. In this regard,
the objective of this contribution is to examine the main interferences that Sardinian or Sardinian-
Corsican dialects may have exerted on the Catalan variety spoken in Alghero, itself the product
of the hybridisation of distinct diatopic speech forms introduced by Aragonese colonists in
the 14th century. The analysis is based on field research conducted through questionnaires and
interviews administered to native speakers and aims to collect up-to-date and contextualised
linguistic data in order to highlight the coexistence of conservative and innovative features at
the phonetic, syntactic, morphological and lexical levels, thus outlining a detailed portrayal of
modern Algherese by means of a comparative approach that accounts for standard Catalan, different
Catalan dialects and other Romance varieties as references.