Microcontact

This app belongs to the Microcontact project, which is funded by the European Research Council and carried out at Utrecht University (NL). The Microcontact App promotes the documentation and preservation of the Italian dialects through the active participation of native and heritage speakers.

Microcontact investigates language variation and change from the Italian heritage perspective. The aim of the research is to study the changes in the dialects of the Italian immigrants in the Americas, who entered in contact with Spanish, Portuguese, French and English. The research also explores dialect heritage among the descendants of the first-generation immigrants.

The App operates as a crowdsourcing system of data collection for scientific purposes. The App enables the recording of acoustic-only language samples, which are uploaded on the Microcontact interactive Atlas. The published recordings are kept anonymous.