Through the Southern Italo-Romance and Salentinian dialects this thesis aims at using cladistics to the service of dialectology. One must understand the cladistics as a means of classification mainly linked to the phylogenetic and typological study of animal and plant species. Most of the research focuses on the study of various dialectal diasystems that emerge from the cladistic analysis applied to the Southern Italo-Romance field. From a sociolinguistic point of view after a first study which describes the level of diglossia and the degree of use of the dialect in the Salentinian area, this thesis travels through the history of the Southern Italo-Romance dialects as well as the history of the Romance Italian dialectology since the first attempts to classify the dialects. Two different corpuses have been used. The first one was obtained after the studying of the ILA and it helped the analysis of the Southern Italo-Romance field as a whole. The dialectal area taken into account include Campania, Basilicata, Apulia, Salento, Sardinia, Sicily and Calabria. In each of these regions we have chosen three points according to an equidistant structure. We have selected 20 witness words. As for the second corpus, it was achieved through a questionnaire the author herself made in the Salento area and it is composed of 35 variables and six geographical points. The latter has been created on the basis of some sociologic criteria that the cladistic method had us to include into the analysis. The results we obtained don't imply to question the previous classifications but it allows a more formative vision of the dialectal fields studied by underlining the diversity of its own structure.
