Aspetti dell'Italiano Parlato. Klaus Hölker, Christiane Maass, Eds., LIT, Münster, 2005, 288 pp.

The volume collects the contributions presented at the International Conference ‘‘Aspects of spoken Italian: Between national language and regional variety’’,1 held in Hanover in May, 2003. The Conference aimed to stimulate a critical discussion on the current perspectives on the research on spoken Italian (henceforth sI), with special attention paid to its relationships with standard and neo-standard varieties on one hand, and with the dialects on the other. The contributions do not provide the reader with any unique or common definition of sI, presenting a multi-focal perspective; the heterogeneity of fields of investigation, theoretical approaches and methodologies paints an interesting and realistic picture of the multiformity that intrinsically qualifies the empirical manifestations of the spoken varieties.