Documenting Italo-Romance minority languages in the Americas: Problems and tentative solutions

This article describes the process of preparation and implementation of a data collection enterprise targeting Italo-Romance emigrant languages in North and South America. This data collection is part of the ERC Microcontact project, which aims to understand language change in contact by examining the language of Italian communities in the Americas (https://microcontact.sites.uu.nl). The speakers involved in our study are first-generation Italians (so-called émigrés; henceforth: “G1”), most of whom emigrated to North and South America between the 1940s and the 1960s, and secondand third-generation speakers (heritage speakers, “HS”). The population of Italian emigrants is close to ideal for a study on language contact, because most of them were tendentially monolingual