Corrado Grassi e le comunità locali: dalla documentazione del dato dialettale alle forme della riappropriazione

The article examines two closely interconnected aspects of Corrado Grassi’s scholarly legacy: on the one hand, his theoretical and methodological reflec- tion on the elicitation of dialect data and on their aggregation into descriptive and interpretative tools; on the other, his largely unintended contribution to processes of Occitan identity construction in the Piedmont valleys. The link between these two dimensions is identified in fieldwork, understood as the foundational moment of geolinguistic research and as a privileged space of interaction between the linguist and local speech communities. The analysis is framed within the Gilliéronian and Terracinian tradition of geolinguistics and considers Grassi’s work in relation to the historical and sociocultural context of the second half of the twentieth century.