«Lа lenga d’oé» in the Original and in the Literary Imitation by Umberto Eco

In his novel “Baudolino”, the Italian writer and medievalist Umberto Eco creates an imitation of a document in the Piedmontese dialect of the 12th century. The article is devoted to the consideration of the linguistic characteristics of this literary imitation in comparison with the language of a real-life early monument of the Piedmontese dialect, a collection of sermons at the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries “Sermoni subalpine”. The analysis revealed an exact imitation of the main phonetic characteristics of the Piedmontese dialect and various linguo-graphic methods of text archaization used by the writer.