138 Giovanna Marotta
A great deal of modern sociolinguistic research is essentially sociophonetic,
since the phonetic level of language is traditionally the most investigated in this
domain. If we consider traditional dialectology too, it is easy to observe that the
phonetic analyses are much more numerous than the morphological or syntactic
ones, especially with reference to the Italian domain.^1 On the other hand, the
term ‘sociophonetics’ is quite recent in the scientific literature of linguistics.^2 It is
probably not a chance the fact that in the index of both volumes of Principles of
Linguistic Change (Labov 1994, 2001), the term sociophonetics is missing, and its
field is mostly covered by ‘sociolinguistics’ and ‘sociolinguistic patterns’.^3
In short, it is quite clear that a sociophonetic perspective entails the study of
those phonetic variations in speech that are socially driven. However, as normally
acknowledged, the correlation between speech variation and social structure is the
basic tenet of traditional sociolinguistics since the beginning of its history, with
the seminal work by Labov in the mid-1960s.
What seems to be the peculiar, and maybe innovative, feature of sociopho-
netic research is probably the wish of joining sociolinguistics with experimental
phonetics.^4 However, as Labov himself (2006: 500) expressly recognizes, in the
sociolinguistic enterprise phonetic acoustic analysis played a major role since the
earlier studies of sound changes in progress occurring in many speech communi-
ties. Being specifically focused on the interaction between the social context and
phonetic controlled experimentation, sociophonetics appears to be more a sub-
field of sociolinguistics than an autonomous discipline. Its tenets, both theoretical
and methodological, are borrowed from sociolinguistics on one hand, and from
experimental phonetics, on the other.
There is no doubt that phonetic variability may index social meaning: the large
amount of data coming from different areas of the world has been witnessing this- As a matter of fact, the situation concerning the Italian dialects requires a special attention,
because the amount of data collected throughout the last centuries is indeed very rich and
remarkable, both on the quantitative and qualitative sides. - As is well-known, this term goes back to a PhD thesis discussed in 1974 at UCL (Deshaies-
Lafontaine 1974). Moreover, as Foulkes & Docherty (2006) observe, it has neither been used in
a consistent way nor often adopted till present time. - However, it is interesting to observe that some years later, the same Labov (2006) wrote a
very stimulating article in the special issue of the Journal of Phonetics devoted to Modelling
sociophonetic variation, where he discusses some of the typical theoretical and methodological
problems connected with a sociophonetic framework, and claims that “sociophonetic studies
are not disjoined from the broader field of sociolinguistics” (Labov 2006: 501). - As Jannedy & Hay (2006: 406) wrote, sociophonetic researchers “feel they straddle the divide
between sociolinguistics and phonetics”.