The contribution of dialectometry to the study of the dialects of Italy. A case study on Tuscan.

We will illustrate the extent to which the recent advances of dialectometry can help to gain insight into the nature of linguistic variation - both synchronically and diachronically - in the study of the dialects of Tuscany, which have a special status in the complex puzzle of Italian dialects. This will be done by discussing the results achieved in a case study carried out over the last five years based on the corpus of dialectal data of the Atlante Lessicale Toscano ('Lexical Atlas of Tuscany', henceforth ALT, Giacomelli et al., 2000), a regional linguistic atlas focusing on dialec tal variation throughout Tuscany, a region where both Tuscan and non-Tuscan dialects are spoken.