The ‘HELLO Campania’ project and dataset: documenting language practices of linguistic minorities in Campania, Italy

HELLO Campania (Heritage Languages and the Languages of the Others in Campania) is
a project focused on immigrant minority languages and their speakers in the Campania
region of Italy. In this paper, we present the scientific background of the project and
highlight its innovative aspects. We also describe the methodology used for data collection,
and we provide an overview of the dataset and the structure of the HELLO Campania
Collection, which has been archived and is available for consultation in the Eurac Research
CLARIN Centre repository. The dataset consists of sociolinguistic interviews, language
portraits, and linguistic tasks collected from speakers belonging to six communities:
Bangladesh, Ghana, the Philippines, Senegal, Sri Lanka, and Ukraine. The aim of this
paper is twofold. First, it serves as a reference point for users interested in the HELLO
Campania Collection, offering insights into the project’s objectives and methodological
framework. Second, it contributes to a broader reflection on methodological approaches in
research on multilingualism and heritage languages, with particular attention to the
advantages and limitations of sociolinguistic techniques, such as questionnaires, and
elicited data, such as linguistic tasks