“Going standard” on a blank page. A corpus-based approach to the written varieties of the Italian Western Alps minorities (Occitan, Francoprovençal and Walser)

This chapter investigates non-standard languages, i.e., those which are dialectal, non-standardised – or standardised to a very limited extent, repre- sented by the local linguistic varieties that populate the Italian Western Alps. Despite the fact that these have almost exclusively existed as spoken lan- guages throughout their history, our particular aim is to discuss methods and problems raised by the investigation of written corpora of these vari- eties from a corpus linguistics perspective. This is especially challenging because corpus linguistics usually employs methods and standards elabo- rated for standard(ised) written varieties. Focusing the Occitan and Franco- provençal varieties, it is shown that the different historical backgrounds of the two languages also have an impact on their speakers’ attitude towards standardisation and on how texts are produced and accordingly made accessible for corpus linguistics methods.