Com'è bello far mešat: istrska prepletanja in italijansko-slovenski jezikovni stik

Situations of intense cultural and linguistic contact in historically mixed areas bring forth various contact-induced linguistic phenomena. This is undoubtedly the case in Istria, where the Romance and Slavic cultures coexist, intertwine, and sometimes still clash. The monograph examines the occurrence of code-switching (i.e. the use of ele­ments from more than one code by a single speaker, in the same conversation and even in a single utterance) between Italian and Slovene among bilingual speakers within the Italian national minority, which is an integral part of the culturally and linguistically diverse community on the Slovene coast. Based on a thorough revi­ew of existing research on contact phenomena and code-switching in particular, three main objectives were set: first, to determine the typology of code-switching between Italian and Slovene among bilingual speakers within the Italian natio­nal minority on both structural and a functional levels; second, to observe how conversational settings, as well as the age and ethnicity of the speakers, influence the occurrence of code-switching; and third, to explore the community’s attitu­des towards the individual codes of their linguistic repertoire and towards code­-switching.