A Digital Library of Grammatical Resources for European Dialects

The paper illustrates the methodology at the basis of the design of a digital library system that enables the management of linguistic resources of curated dialect data. Since dialects are rarely recognized as official languages, first of all linguists need a dedicated information management system providing the unambiguous identification of each dialect on the basis of geographical, administrative and geolinguistic parameters. Secondly, the information management system has to be designed to allow users to search the occurrences of a specific grammatical structure (e.g. a relative clause or a particular word order). Thirdly, user-friendly graphical interfaces must give easy access to language resources and make the building of the language resources easier and distributed. This work, which stems from a project named ASIt (Atlante Sintattico d’Italia), is a first step towards the creation of a European digital library for recording and studying linguistic micro-variation.