In this thesis I contribute towards settling a disagreement among scholars concerning the
classification of Gallo-“Italic”.¹ The scholarly literature unanimously describes Gallo-“Italic” as
showing all the linguistic traits that distinguish Gallo-Romance from the other Romance varieties.
Nonetheless, while some scholars classify Gallo-“Italic” as Gallo-Romance, some others classify
it as Italo-Romance (‘pro-Italo-’ scholars). These two labels (‘Gallo-Romance’ and ‘Italo-
Romance’) are irreconcilable, as they are regularly presented in the literature as being mutually
exclusive and, in particular, they are normally used in the family tree model to name two cousin
taxa: Gallo-Romance is a Western Romance daughter, while Italo-Romance is an Eastern Romance
daughter. I argue that the pro-Italo- stance has to be rejected for several different reasons. Firstly,
by making recourse to Kloss’s distinction of Abstand vs. Ausbau, I show that, in their proposed
classifications, the pro-Italo- scholars mix the Abstand and the Ausbau criteria and that this is
inconsistent with the aims of classificatory science. In fact, following Kloss (1967), Abstand and
Ausbau have to be seen as classificatory criteria of two independent classifications that, moreover,
should be expressed by two formally distinct nomenclatures. I argue that, in science, classifications
have an informative function, and that by employing such a mixed criterion pro-Italo- scholars have
provided a flawed “classification” that is informative neither of the Abstand nor of the Ausbau
status of the varieties classified, hence it is not useful for scientific purposes and should therefore
be rejected. Secondly, I show that some scholars’ proposal of grouping Gallo-“Italic” with Italo-
Romance in a synchronological classification (i.e. based on current linguistic similarity) should be
rejected too. These scholars claim that, over the centuries, contact with Tuscan/Italian literary
language would have made Gallo-“Italic” more similar to Italo-Romance than to its sibling Gallo-
Romance varieties. However, despite making a statement that is quantitative in nature, these
scholars do not provide quantitative evidence supporting it. Through the above arguments—that
are epistemological in nature—I reject the pro-Italo- stance on the basis of linguistic evidence that
is already available. Finally, by means of a series of empirical tests comparing intelligibility
between speakers of different geolects, I provide new linguistic evidence that present-day Gallo-
“Italic” is still linguistically more similar to the bordering Gallo-Romance than to the bordering
Italo-Romance geolects, hence it is still properly grouped with the former and not with the latter,
even from a synchronological standpoint.

¹ I write Gallo-“Italic” with inverted commas because the Italic linguistic profile of this group is just the point of
contention in this thesis. Partly interpreting Pierre Bec’s suggestion (Bec, 1970-1971: II 316), it might be better labelled
as ‘Cisalpine Gallo-Romance’.