La lingua dei Longobardi di Benevento

Occurrences of Germanic lexical items, including placenames and personal names, in Italian contribute to the reconstruction of the language spoken by the Lombards. These data, together with further occurrences in medieval texts written in Southern Italy, are a valuable source for studying the Lombard dialect in its diachronic and diatopic variation and offer a better knowledge of the processes of language contact between Germanic and Romance languages and cultures in those areas. The article gives some examples of lexical and onomastic borrowings and hybrid words and names and at the same time discusses some methodological problems in their analysis.