What is it about?
The article presents an acoustic analysis of Italian dental affricates /ts dz/ pronounced by young speakers in Bolzano (South Tyrol, Italy). For its history and geography, the area is great for analysis in contact linguistics between Italian and Southern German varieties. For this study, a small group of young Italian mother speakers has been compared with German mother speakers. The recordings consist of word-list reading of Italian words and tongue-twists. The results show the emergence of some phonetic phenomena due to language contact in the realization of dental affricates by L1 and L2 speakers.
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Why is it important?
Dental affricates are complex sounds, with a high degree of variation. The paper shows how these small units could change in situation of language contact in young speakers, by offering a detail account on how dental affricates should be tagged for acoustic analysis. The article also presents some instances of intermediate voicing, and other phonetic phenomena affecting the realization of dental affricates in this peculiar situation.
Perspectives
This work is part of a broad research on the Italian of Bolzano, which was part of my PhD thesis and ended up in the CITABOL corpus. It was a pleasure to add also the perspective of L2 speakers, and I hope that this paper will open new perspectives in the study of the phonetics of Italian, especially in contact situations.
Dr Chiara Meluzzi
University of Pavia
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: “Zeta” di frontiera: confronto tra giovani bolzanini italofoni e germanofoni, Éducation et sociétés plurilingues, December 2015, OpenEdition,
DOI: 10.4000/esp.666.
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