DiatopIt: A Corpus of Social Media Posts for the Study of Diatopic Language Variation in Italy

We introduce DiatopIt, the first corpus specifically focused on diatopic language variation in Italy for language varieties other than Standard Italian. DiatopIt comprises over 15K geolocated social media posts from Twitter over a period of two years, including regional Italian usage and content fully written in local language varieties or exhibiting code-switching with Standard Italian. We detail how we tackled key challenges in creating such a resource, including the absence of orthography standards for most local language varieties and the lack of reliable language identification tools. We assess the representativeness of DiatopIt across time and space, and show that the density of non-Standard Italian content across areas correlates with actual language use. We finally conduct computational experiments and find that modeling diatopic variation on highly multilingual areas such as Italy is a complex task even for recent language models.