A Methodology for the Management of Contact Languages Data. The Case Study of the Jews of Corfu

Language contact is an actuating force of language change and in certain multilingual settings may lead to the transfer of syntactic features between languages, to the emergence of new grammatical categories or even to the abrupt genesis of new languages. While literature in contact linguistics abounds with case studies in the emergence of 'hybrid' or 'contact' languages, many of them not only remain poorly documented, but also lack digital written corpora and therefore rich representation in the area of computational linguistics. This paper aims at i) presenting the creation of the first annotated corpus of written and oral linguistic data related to the linguistic practices of the Corfiot Jews; ii) producing specific rules on the identification of diachronic and synchronic morphosyntactic features of written and oral linguistic data of Corfioto, the Romance variety of the Jewish community of Corfu; iii) the integration of a text-mining framework for the automatic language recognition of morphosyntactic features of Corfioto.