QUARANT’ANNI DI RIFLESSIONI (SOCIO)LINGUISTICHE

The present contribution is the core of a paper presented at a Padua meeting to honour a dear friend and colleague, Alberto M. Mioni, no longer with us, in an endeavour to outline and explain a particular intellectual environment and the beginnings of his and others’ attempts to found and start up sociolinguistic studies in Italy from the Seventies and Eighties of the last century to the present. Obviously, sociolinguistics is to be understood here in its broadest sense, both qualitative and quantitative, as a discipline that deals with questions of social variation, contact linguistics, language and the law, linguistic ideology, standardization, ethnolinguistics and dialectology (in a new sense).