Chapter 5. New parameters for the sociophonetic indexes 143
with the other Romance languages: the contrast between C and C: exhibits a very
high functional load in most varieties. Nevertheless, Northern dialects lack long
consonants, and for this reason Northern speakers of Italian may show a less con-
sistent and systematic correlation of gemination.
Although the phoneme inventory of Standard Italian is basically the Florentine
one, a great amount of phenomena occurring in the Tuscan varieties of Italian are
absent in the standard national language. Our focus will be on the Tuscan varieties of
Italian more than on the dialects spoken in Tuscany, the so-called vernacoli. Despite
the closeness between the standard language and the dialects spoken in Tuscany, it
is indeed possible to single out the structural properties of Tuscan varieties from the
general ones belonging to Italian (see for instance Agostiniani & Giannelli 1990).
The main phonological processes typical of the Tuscan pronunciation of
Italian can be summarized as follows (see Giannelli 1976, 1988; Giannelli & Savoia
1978, 1979–80; Agostiniani 1989, 1992; Marotta 1995, 2008):
- the so-called gorgia toscana, that is the typical lenition of stops in intervocalic
position; e.g. SI pipa ‘pipe’, Tsc [ˈpiːφa], SI vita ‘life’, Tsc [ˈviːθa], SI poco ‘little’,
Ts c [ˈpɔːxo];^7 - the spirantization of palatal affricates in intervocalic position; e.g. SI amici
‘friends’ [aˈmiːtʃi], Tsc [aˈmiːʃi], SI bicicletta ‘bike’ [ˌbitʃiˈkletːa], Tsc [ˌbiʃiˈxletːa],
SI agile ‘agile’ [ˈaːdʒile], Tsc [ˈaːʒile]; - the affrication of /s/ after alveolar sonorants; e.g. SI salsa ‘sauce’, Tsc [ˈsaltsa],
SI borsa ‘bag’, Tsc [ˈbortsa], SI pensiero ‘thought’ Tsc [penˈtsjɛːro]; - the apocope, that is the deletion of postvocalic vowels in word-final position;
e.g. SI la mia mamma ‘my mother’, Tsc la mi’ mamma; SI la sua sorella ‘your
sister’, Tsc la su’ sorella; SI dei bambini ‘some children’, Tsc de’ bimbi; - the sandhi process called rafforzamento (or raddoppiamento) fonosintattico,
a consonant lengthening process taking place at word boundary after some
function words or after an oxytone word; e.g. io e Maria [e ˈmːariːa] ‘Mary and
I’, da Roma [da ˈrːoma] ‘from Rome’, un tè leggero [ˌtɛ lːeˈdːʒɛːro] ‘a light tea’,
parlò forte [parˌlɔ ˈfːorte] ‘(s/he) spoke aloud’;^8 - the truncation of infinitive verbal forms; e.g. SI mangiàre ‘to eat’, Tsc [manˈdʒa],
vedére ‘to see’, Tsc [veˈδe], SI sentìre ‘to hear’, Tsc [senˈti].^9 - Here and in the rest of the paper, SI = Standard Italian, Tsc = Tuscan.
- The historical source of this process is the assimilation at word boundary between an ety-
mological final consonant and a following initial consonant (see Loporcaro 1997). Central and
Southern dialects as well as their respective varieties of Italian share the process, although the
lexical distribution can vary from place to place; the phenomenon is lacking in the North of
Italy, where no length contrast occurs, at least in the dialects. - This last process has a morphophonological nature, since it applies to a specific category of
forms in the Verbal Inflection; see Marotta (2000) for details.