142 Giovanna Marotta
A central feature of any sociolinguistic approach is the acknowledgement of
the intrinsically dynamic nature of language: far from being a static monolith, lan-
guage is considered as a living organism, it is viewed in its actual usage, as a social
medium of communication among people. If we acknowledge that sociophonetic
variables can be assigned different values as regards their status, scope and aware-
ness degree, we will be able to better represent the intrinsically dynamic nature of
language structure.
As already mentioned, the point of view assumed here is more system- oriented
than speaker-oriented. In other words, we are not concerned with sociophonetic
indexes in strict relation with different or special groups of speakers, or particular
styles of speaking. Neither will we present any fine-grained acoustical analysis of the
relevant Tuscan phonological processes, because all these phenomena have already
been analyzed in detail by Italian scholars in the previous literature. We rather focus
on the general properties of sociophonetic variation, in order to show how they may
interact with each other and whether they can affect the linguistic structure.
In short, the present article would like to be a modest contribution to adequately
handling sociophonetic variability occurring in Italian varieties, with the hope that
other scholars could find this proposal useful in future sociophonetic research.- The linguistic repertoire of Tuscany
As is well known, Standard Italian is based on the Tuscan dialect; more precisely, on
Florentine as spoken in the late 13th/14th centuries.^6 The vowel system is the same
in Standard Italian and in the Tuscan variety of Italian: seven phonemes (/a ɛ e i
ɔ o u/) in stressed syllable, five in unstressed position (where the opposition between
mid-open and mid-closed vowels is not effective). No length contrast occurs in vow-
els, although a phonetic rule of vowel lengthening applies in the context of stressed
open non final syllable (e.g. pane [ˈpaːne] ‘bread’, piede [ˈpjɛːde] ‘foot’, tavolo [ˈtaːvolo]
‘table’ vs. pasta [ˈpasta] ‘pasta’, mangiò [manˈdʒɔ] ‘(s/he) ate’). As for the consonant
system, the Italian repertoire, as well as the Tuscan one, is rather simple: the places
of articulation for obstruents are bilabial (/p b/), labiodentals ( / f v/), dental (/t d s/),
palatal (/ʃ/) and velar (/k g/). The sonorants are /r l ʎ/, the nasals /m n ɲ/, with the
allophones [ɱ ŋ]. The picture is enriched by the occurrence of a set of affricates
(/ ts dz tʃ dʒ/) and by the feature of length, which applies to almost all consonants
of Italian and Tuscan as well. As a matter of fact, gemination is certainly one of the
most relevant phonological features of Italian consonant system, even in comparison- The Florentine dialect acquired its prestige because of the masterpieces of Italian literature
written by Florentine authors, in particular Dante and Boccaccio (cf. Lepschy and Lepschy
1977). For a general picture of the phonology of Italian, see Bertinetto & Loporcaro (2005).