Italo-Romance: Gallo-Italic

The article offers a brief introduction to Gallo-Italic dialects, presenting both the group as a whole and its subdivisions. It starts with the history of the term 'Gallo-Italic', coined in the 19th century by Bernardino Biondelli, and presents the features of this group of dialects focusing in particular on their historical development. This is followed by an overview of the different subdivisions of the Gallo-Italic dialect area covering some phonetic, morphological, syntactic and lexical characteristics which typify Ligurian, Piedmontese, Lombard and Emilian-Romagnol dialects.