The articles in this festschrift for the Romance studies scholar Gerhard Ernst (Regensburg) concentrate on topics that have been a constant preoccupation of his research and teaching throughout his career, notably language varieties, with special reference to Roman urban dialect and the history of language. The volume's major emphasis is on a discussion of Italian, French, and Romanian, both from the diachronic and the synchronic perspective.

The study takes 17 phonetic and 9 morphological variables as the basis for determining the degree of dialectality displayed by 84 informants from the Italian capital. It transpires that the distance between maximum dialectality and maximum proximity to standard Italian is slight, a conclusion painstakingly substantiated not only with reference to sociolinguistic models but also to the specifically linguistic findings yielded by the survey. Possible causes for the apparent gradual decline of this urban dialect are discussed, as are the innovative tendencies also observable.