A few remarks on colloquial language in Italy

The present work focuses on the analysis of colloquial Italian starting from the rasgos coloquializadores (a series of conversational markers) describing the Spanish sociolinguistic research on informal contexts. After a short introduction on the rasgos, the second part of this article deals with the pattern of colloquial Italian. It may be considered a macro-variety sharing features belonging to several varieties of the Italian linguistic repertoire, further supported by the use of dialect. The theoretical context is also based on a significant number of examples from spontaneous and colloquial speech collected in Palermo. These examples show both the varied features of colloquial Italian and the aim of each linguistic item involved at a pragmatic level. Moreover, the analysis includes an overview of the main functions of Italian-to-dialect code-switching, which represents an additional communicative device in informal situations.