The ASIt corpus contains dialect data of ca. 200 (Northern) Italian dialects. The data on Northern Italian dialects has been gathered during interviews with dialect speakers between 1985 and 2005. At the moment of writing (June 2010) also data on Southern Italian dialects is being collected.

The first round of the project consisted of written questionnaires which were presented to linguists who were also native speakers of a dialect. On the basis of the filled in questionnaires the questionnaires were revised and (if necessary) completed and in turn presented to (non-linguist) dialect speakers. The informants did not need to be of a certain age. Information concerning age, education, origin of parents and grandparents was noted, to be able to account for certain sociolinguistic factors. The informants were asked to translate the sentences into their dialect. The results of the oral interviews constitute the source of the dialect data in the ASIt corpus.

The data is available in written form. The question sentences are enriched with grammatical tags at the word level and translated into English. The dialect data is not tagged or translated.

The interviews and questionnaires focus on specific syntactic phenomena, such as subject clitics, object clitics, auxiliary selection, modals and modality. The responsible institution for the ASIt corpus is the Information Management Systems Group at the Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, Italy. The corpus can be visited at http://asis-cnr.unipd.it/ or at http://asit.maldura.unipd.it.