Reformulation in bilingual speech: Italian cioè in German and Ladin

•The paper deals with the borrowing of a reformulation marker in the Italian context.•Reformulation markers are borrowed from the pragmatically dominant language.•Intense, every-day bilingualism is required for such borrowing to take place.•Metalinguistic functions of reformulation play a key role in bilingual speech.

This paper deals with the borrowing of the Italian reformulation marker cioè in the German and Ladin linguistic minorities in Italy. A corpus of bi- and multilingual conversations is analyzed in order to verify the sociolinguistic distribution and the functional scope of borrowed markers in bilingual and monolingual discourse. Our hypothesis is that the metalinguistic processes involved in reformulation are particularly relevant for bilingual speakers who are constantly dealing with bilingual texts and other bilingual interlocutors. The analysis reveals that, unlike other well studied discourse markers, reformulation markers are borrowed only when contact languages are employed in every-day informal domains by actual bilingual speakers who are used to engaging in language alternation practices.