Il Nuovo Vocabolario di Base e il lessico degli stranieri: una prima ricognizione quantitativa

The New Basic Vocabulary of Italian (NVDB) published in 2016 by Tullio de Mauro represents an important resource for those, among others, interested in varieties of Italian as L2, and especially in learning processes of vocabulary of Italian as L2. The aim of this paper is to compare the most frequently used vocabulary by native speakers with the vocabulary used by non-native speakers. The NVDB will be compared with the frequency and usage lists driven by the LIPS – Lexicon of Italian Spoken by Foreigners (Gallina, 2015) in order to see, first of all, how many lexical units belonging to the NVDB are present also in the LIPS corpus. The research hypothesis is that lexical uses of non-native speakers are very similar to those of native speakers, which represents the main learning input for Italian L2 learners, and that the vocabulary used by non-native speakers is even more similar to that of native speakers in the first two layers of NVDB, namely the Fundamental vocabulary and the High Usage vocabulary, whereas the High Availability vocabulary is not widely used among foreigners. We will present also a first overview of the results of an analysis of NVDB words used also by non-native speakers and their frequency and usage range in the LIPS.