Abstract

At the end of the 19th century, linguists interested in language teaching, dialectology and language classification devoted themselves to the study of spoken languages. Field research was facilitated by the use of new phonographic technologies and phonographic archives were created, with the first ones in Berlin and in Vienna. These archives organised the systematic collection of world language records in the prison camps of the two central empires during the First World War. Thanks to these pioneering efforts it is now possible to recover the first sound documentation of numerous Italian dialects.