摘要：Recent revivals of local cultures and languages, as well as ideologically-loaded debates
on the role of dialects at school usually ignore the fact that the scientific study of
dialects and of closely related systems can be very interesting for a theory of language
and also in the domain of linguistic education. In particular, dialects provide larger sets
of variants and of variant combinations that can become relevant in the definition of
typological variation. Even when their linguistic ¡°substance¡± is quite similar, dialects
display different forms of linguistic patterning and of fine-grained variation. Focusing
on the Romance-Germanic contact area encompassing the alpine space, patterns of
variation in the inflectional behaviour of numerals will be considered. This topic
provides a good example of dialects exhibiting a higher degree of complexity than most
European standard languages.
