Language contact and sociophonetic variation (original) (raw)
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Phonetic variation of /r/ in a language contact context: The case of South Tyrol Italian
The main objective of the study is to propose feasible methods for the analysis and modelling of those phonetic variations that are the result from language contact. To this end, I report here the results of two empirical examinations conducted on rhotacism when Italian comes in contact with a German dialect in the area of Bolzano (Alto Adige region, Italy), namely the Tyrolean dialect. The first experiment presented here intends to describe the main features of the sociolinguistic variation of /r/. The second experiment shows an example of articulatory sociophonetic analysis conducted on an early bilingual speaker.
SoPhISM (The SocioPhonetics of verbal Interaction: Sicilian Multimodal corpus) is an acoustic and articulatory sociophonetic corpus focused on whithin-speaker variation as a function of stylistic/communicative factors. The corpus is particularly intended for the study of rhotics as a sociolinguistic variable in the production of Sicilian speakers. Rhotics are analyzed according to the distinction between single-phase and multiple-phase rhotics along with the presence of constriction and aperture articulatory phases. Based on these parameters, the annotation protocol seeks to classify rhotic variants within a sufficiently granular, but internally consistent, phonetic perspective. The proposed descriptive parameters allow for the discussion of atypical realizations in terms of phonetic derivations (or simplifications) of typical closure–aperture sequences. The distribution of fricative variants in the speech repertoire of one speaker and his interlocutors shows the potential provided by SoPhISM for sociophonetic variation to be studied at the 'micro' level of individual speaker's idiolects.
Style and addressees in the selection of dialectal vs standard phonetic forms: Sicilian rhotics
Quaderns d'Italià, 2020
This study is about the production of singleton and geminate rhotics by young adult Sicilian speakers, whose native languages are Italian and a Sicilian dialect, during speech interactions with different interlocutors. As in many other languages, /r/ works as a sociolinguistic variable in the Sicilian area, conveying social and geographical information about the speaker. We will show that it also conveys information about the communicative and interactional dynamics with peers speaking either Italian or Sicilian dialects. We propose that in the process of selecting the relevant variants of the /r/ variable, the speakers are guided by the socio-communicative context and the phenomena of mutual convergence between interlocutors.
The Sociophonetics of /r/ in Bozen: Modelling Linguistic and Social Variation
International Journal of Linguistics, 2016
How do speakers reconstruct the boundaries of an allophonic system? In our paper, we address this question and examine how speakers organize into consistent groups of allophones the array of /r/-variants that are used in South-Tyrol Italian (STI). In addition, we discuss that this process of grouping is based on two intertwining sources of variation: the linguistic source and the socio-indexical source. We argue that the indexical dimension is not disconnected from the linguistic one, but it contributes in an essential way to its structuring. Our investigation is based on a sample of two thousand tokens of /r/. These occurrences are extracted from a corpus that includes the (semi)spontaneous productions of 14 Italian-German bilingual speakers. The analysis concerns the identification of possible relationships among the allophones with respect to (a) distributional, (b) stylistic and (c) biographical factors. Data are analyzed using a multivariate exploratory technique, namely the multiple correspondence analysis approach. The results clearly show how the aggregation of indexical and linguistic factors determines the emergence of two different allophonic subsystems, that is the Italian of Italian-dominant speakers (STI-i) and the Italian of German-dominant speakers (STI-d).
A UTI study on the phonetic allophony of Tyrolean /R/
2015
Moving from traditional dialectological literature and inspired by contemporary research on rhotics, in this paper we present preliminary data on the distribution and the articulation of /r/ in Tyrolean, an under-researched South Bavarian dialect. Two speakers produced a comprehensive selection of Tyrolean words containing /r/. They uttered up to five different uvular rhotics: [χ, ʁ, ʁ̞, ρ, ʀ]. We found mild tendencies in the allophonic distribution of the variants, but systematic differences in their lingual configurations: trills are produced steep lowering the tongue tip; vocalizations are markedly lowered and retracted, with the tongue dorsum flat; approximants are retracted.
An acoustic analysis of /r/ in Tyrolean
INTERSPEECH 2016
This paper offers a preliminary contribution to the phonetic description and acoustic characterization of /r/ allophony in Tyrolean dialect, an under-researched South Bavarian Dialect spoken in the North of Italy. The analysis of target words containing /r/ in different phonotactic contexts, produced by six Tyrolean female speakers, confirms the high degree of intra-speaker variation in the production of /r/ with a uvular place of articulation. The distributional analysis of the allophones in our sample shows a preference among all the speakers for a fricative manner of articulation followed by approximants and taps and, to a lesser extent, by trills (with a very small amount of vocalized variants). These results are in line with previous research in the South-Tyrolean community. Due to the high variability of rhotic sounds, we further investigate and report on some of their shared acoustic features such as duration across the different phonotactic contexts and Harmonics-to-Noise Ratio for the different allophones attested.
Sociolinguistic Aspects and Language Contact: Evidence from Francoprovençal of Apulia
Journal of Language Contact
The aim of this paper is to investigate two Francoprovençal speaking communities in the Italian region of Apulia, Faeto and Celle di St. Vito. Despite the regional neighborhood of the two towns, and their common isolation from other Francoprovençal speaking communities, their sociolinguistic conditions are deeply different. They differ in reference to the functional distribution of the languages of the repertoire and speakers’ language uses, and in reference to the degree of ‘permeability’ of Francoprovençal varieties towards Italian and its dialects. The repertoire composition and the relationship between the codes have a key role both for minority language maintenance and for language contact processes. In this perspective, I analyse some language contact phenomena in a sample of speakers discourse. I report correlations between the choice of different code-mixing strategies and three sociolinguistic variables (age, sex and village), but not with occupation.