A corrigendum relating to this article has been published at ht De Cia, S and Iubini-Hampton, J 2020 Debunking Rhaeto-Romance: Synchronic Evidence from Two Peripheral Northern Italian Dialects. Modern Languages Open, 2020(1): 7 pp. 1–18. DOI: https://doi. org/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.309 ARTICLE – LINGUISTICS Debunking Rhaeto-Romance: Synchronic tp://doi.org/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.358. Evidence from Two Peripheral Northern Italian Dialects Simone De Cia1 and Jessica Iubini-Hampton2 1 University of Manchester, GB 2 University of Liverpool, GB Corresponding author: Jessica Iubini-Hampton (
[email protected]) tp://doi.org/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.358. This paper explores two peripheral Northern Italian dialects (NIDs), namely Lamonat and Frignanese, with respect to their genealogical linguistic classification. The two NIDs exhibit morpho-phonological and morpho-syntactic features that do not fall neatly into the Gallo-Italic sub-classification of Northern Italo-Romance, but resemble some of the core characteristics of the putative Rhaeto-Romance language family. This analysis of Lamonat and Frignanese reveals that their con- servative traits more closely relate to Rhaeto-Romance. The synchronic evidence from the two peripheral NIDs hence supports the argument against the unity and autonomy of Rhaeto-Romance as a language family, whereby the linguistic traits that distinguish Rhaeto-Romance within Northern Italo-Romance consist A corrigendum relating to this article has been published at ht of shared retentions rather than shared innovations, which were once common to virtually all NIDs. In this light, Rhaeto-Romance can be regarded as an array of conservative Gallo-Italic varieties.