Il “romanzo di Rimella” come varietà di contatto

The paper aims at describing the local Romance variety spoken in Rimella, a Germanic linguistic island in Valsesia, Piedmont. It has always been assumed that this dialect, which is a nativized variety of the community (along with Walser German) and the predominant code of its linguistic repertoire, is alike to the Piedmontese variety of the neighboring villages. Through an extensive comparative linguistic analysis, I contend that this is not exactly the case: the Gallo-Italic dialect of Rimella seems to be a peculiar kind contact variety, in which innovative urban features of the variety of Novara coexist with features of the dialects of the Sesia Valley and other features that cannot be precisely linked to a particular dialect. Therefore, I try to link this unique situation with the social setting of Rimella, with a particular focus on seasonal migrations, which seem to have had some role in the formation process of the local variety. Finally, I put forward some hypotheses on the origins of this variety as a koineized dialect, also by drawing a comparison with the similar case of Ornavasso (Ossola), a former Germanic colony that lost its Germanic variety but whose local Romance dialect shows a mixing of urban and local features just as in the case of Rimella