This article describes ideas of the project "Collection of Currently Spoken German". This project is presently planned at the Institute of Phonetics at Munich University. The aim of the project is to collect aspects of currently spoken German by means of a static network of recording stations distributed all over the German speaking area. The RVG1 (Regional Variants of German) corpus serves as a prototype for regionally covered speech data. It can be seen as a first small database of regionally covered recordings of German representing the most common dialectal regions or at least all those regions which could be important for categorizing regional variants into broader classes. RVG1 contains read numbers, phonetically rich sentences and computer commands as well as spontaneous speech. Some features of this corpus will be introduced and discussed.

Whereas dialectologists and regional language militants favour the specificities of the dialects, describing 'in-situation' regional Oïl speaking, which raises interesting theoretical questions of actuality, remains an insufficiently explored domain in France. This paper shows some examples of literary texts of the Oïl regional varieties.Contrarily to the dominant French language tradition, it is demonstrated the 'French' itself (in the central Oïl area) presents diatopic variations: in contrario, in the other Oïl regions, we encounter not French but different varieties: wallon, picard, normand, gallo, poitevin-saintongeais, etc. There, the truly linguistic features cannot be dissociated from symbolic identity, and are a focus for normative constructions. The measure of their existence cannot be reduced to simple statistics (totally unreliable), but it is clear that these varieties have not (not yet ?) disappeared.Correctly apprehending these realities is important for both sociolinguistics and democracy.

Northern Italian varieties are usually divided by traditional dialectology into closed subgroups according to a rigid areal model based on isoglosses. From this viewpoint, the gallo-italian subgroup is considered a well defined and compact set, separated not only from Southern Italian varieties but also from Northern dialects of Venetia and the Rheto-roman domain. The detailed analysis of fieldwork data the micro-variation approach needs, together with an appropriate phonological theory – in this case, Government Phonology – allows to describe, in an unitary framework, a lot of processes often considered heterogeneous and independent. This perspective reveals unexpected convergences between dialects whose similarities could be made opaque in a taxonomical and historical comparative approach.