Stra-ParlaBO documents the Italian spoken by people with experience of international migration who reside in the Bologna metropolitan area. The corpus collects data produced within multilingual communities belonging to four linguistic groups (Moroccan, Bengali, Chinese, and Ukrainian), through semistructured interviews and free-flowing conversations.
The corpus includes 140 participants and a total of 68 hours, 1 minute, and 47 seconds of speech. The recordings were collected through two different types of interaction:
- semi-structured interviews;
- casual conversations.
For each participant, metadata is available regarding:
- age;
- gender;
- level of education;
- occupation;
- native language or languages;
- Country and region of birth;
- age at the time of arrival in Italy;
- length of stay in Italy
Corpus Size
| Community | Interviews | Casual Conversations | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Morocco | 10:42:04 | 5:13:49 | 3:55:53 p.m. |
| Bangladesh | 9:58:16 | 6:52:56 | 4:51:12 PM |
| China | 9:19:00 | 8:49:36 | 6:08:36 p.m. |
| Ukraine | 9:48:30 | 7:17:36 | 5:06:06 p.m. |
| Total | 39:47:50 | 28:13:57 | 68:01:47 |
More information about the corpus
Metadata
The module can be queried using the following metadata as search filters.
Conversations:
Number of participants:
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 8
Community:
- Bengali
- Chinese
- Moroccan
- Ukrainian
Languages Used in the Conversation
- Italian
- Italian-Other
Speakers:
Occupation:
- N/A (we do not have this data)
- Artisan
- Merchant
- Unemployed
- Intellectual
- Non-qualified
- Pensioner
- Student
- Technical
- Office
We adopted the classification of professions developed by Istat (to whose website we refer for more detailed information), integrating it with the categories pens for retirees, disocc for unemployed individuals, and stud for students.
Gender:
- Female
- Male
Place of birth:
- Abruzzo
- Albania
- Bangladesh
- Basilicata
- Belarus
- Campania
- China
- Emilia-Romagna
- Friuli Venezia Giulia
- India
- Lazio
- Lombardy
- Marche
- Morocco
- Molise
- Pakistan
- Piedmont
- Sicily
- United States
- Trentino-South Tyrol
- Veneto
- Ukraine
Age:
- 16-20
- 21-25
- 26-30
- 31-35
- 46-50
- 51-55
- 56-60
- 61-65
- 71-75
- 76-80
- 81-85
- Over85
Educational qualification:
- N/A (i.e., data not available)
- Elementary
- General Diploma Holder
- Dip_tec_prof
- Foreign Diploma
- Degree in progress
- Degree
- Middle School
- none
- PhD
Native language(s):
- Mandarin Chinese
- Mandarin Chinese; a Sinitic language
- Italian
- Russian; Ukrainian
- Mandarin Chinese; Korean
- Ukrainian
- Romanian; Moldovan
- Italian; Arabic
- Arabic
- Italian; Bengali
- Russian
- Bengali
- Mandarin Chinese; Italian
- Arabic; French
- Ukrainian; Polish
- Bengali; Hindi
- Italian; Albanian
- Bengali; Urdu
- Arabic; Berber
Age at arrival in Italy:
- 0–5
- October 6–10
- 11–15
- 16-20
- 21-25
- 26-30
- 31-35
- 36-40
- 41-45
- 46-50
- N/A
Years spent in Italy:
- 0-1
- 02-03
- 04-05
- 06-07
- 08-09
- 10–11
- 12–13
- 14–15
- 16–17
- 18–19
- 20–21
- 22–23
- 23–24
- 24–25
- 26–27
- 28–29
- 30–31
- 32–33
- 34–35
- 36–37
- discontinuous
- N/A
How to cite the module
Zucchini, Eleonora & Ballarè, Silvia & Mauri, Caterina. 2025. “Speaking Italian in a Migrant Context: The Stra-ParlaBO Corpus.” Études romanes de Brno.
Mauri, Caterina & Ballarè, Silvia & Zucchini, Eleonora. 2026. DOI: https://doi.org/10.60760/unibo/stra-parlabo
Coordinators
Eleonora Zucchini, Silvia Ballarè, and Caterina Mauri
Contributors
The following individuals assisted with data collection and transcription: Patrizia Adani, Giovanna Anastasia, Sara Apruzzese, Iman Assakhi, Sara Attanasi, Davide Bacchetta, Chiara Bonini, Irene Calanchi, Aurora Calesini, Esther Cocco, Cosimo Baxter Cole, Martina Colori, Daniela Crunga, Sara D’Ascenzo, Elisabetta Deuscit, Chiara Felicioni, Giulia Gallai, Chiara Gallo, Eloisa Gasparoni, Viola Ghibellini, Elettra Giancola, Laura Leone, Tatiana Leonova, Cecilia Manca, Caterina Mauri, Erika Mendicino, Matilde Minuti, Arianna Ortolani, Nicola Perugini, Silvia Pistore, Sofia Romanato, Alessandro Antonio Sanna, Eleonora Di Scala, Sara De Simone, Alessandra Simonetti, Martina Simonotti, Davide Tintori, Vanessa Tizzano, Nicola Turbian, Sara Venturelli, Yisu Wang, Yuchen Zhu.
Fundings
Project funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) – Mission 4 Education and Research.
Project 'DiverSIta – Diversity in spoken Italian', PI: Caterina Mauri. MUR Project Code [P2022RFR8T] – CUP [J53D23017320001]
Year of publication
2026