Altamurano

Abstract

Altamurano is spoken in Altamura, a town of about 70,000 inhabitants 45 km southwest of Bari (in the latter province, Apulia). It belongs to the Upper Southern subdivision of Italo-Romance (cf. Loporcaro 2013: 143-153), a branch of the Romance language family. The present sketch of Altamurano is meant as an aid for consulting the DAI database (http://www.dai.uzh.ch/): it introduces the notational conventions used in transcribing this variety, which lacks a normalized orthography, and then moves on to giving a synthetic overview of the aspects of the grammar of the dialect which are relevant to the description of agreement phenomena. As will become apparent in §2, the marking of morphosyntactic feature values on some agreement targets is presently undergoing change across the speech community, so that, as it comes to adjectives and participles, (the relevant aspects of) individual subvarieties (idiolects) have to be described, that have been inferred through inspection of the dataset and have to be kept in mind when querying the database.