Per una rivalutazione del contatto linguistico in area romanza settentrionale

In this paper some ambiguous aspects of prosody are tackled in the light of a reassessment of linguistic contact in the ‘northern Romance’. In the belief that an approach based on sociolinguistic variation and multilingualism would surmount the limits of a monolithic and unrealistic view of languages (be they ancient or modern), issues related to the evolution of the vowel quantity, as well as to lexical accent and rhythmic organization are critically discussed. In particular, the alleged shift from syllable timing (typical of Classical Latin) towards the stress-timed pole appears to be essentially restricted to the area of French and its varieties, including the Gallo-Italian dialects. Along these lines, the notion of proto-Romance, certainly useful for historical philology, is criticized inasmuch as it does not correspond to a uniform linguistic reality that should take into account the vast geographical area involved and the long temporal span. As far as the classification of Romance languages goes, a vertical axis (north-south) instead of the traditional horizontal one (east-west) is proposed, which could take into account the more dynamic force of the northern Romance idioms