chapter 6
Sound archives and linguistic variation
The case of the Phlegraean diphtongs
Rosanna Sornicola* and Silvia Calamai**
* Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”
** Università degli Studi di SienaSound archives are important resources for sociophonetic analysis: first, they
contain relatively uncontrolled speech styles, not usually included in the speech
databases used in sociophonetic research; second, they allow us to study in
a historical perspective some phonetic phenomena that would otherwise be
known only for their most recent or contemporary manifestations. Several
complex phonetic phenomena such as Romance diphthongization may be bet-
ter understood by means of sound archives of spontaneous speech. The paper
describes the general principles underlying the building of ADICA (Archivio dei
dialetti campani), an archive of spoken dialectal texts from the Phlegraean area.
The main features of Phlegraean diphthongs are thus discussed with particular
attention to their variability, their social distribution, together with their histori-
cal development.- Introduction
The paper aims at illustrating the usefulness of sound archives of spontaneous
speech for a better understanding of complex phonetic phenomena which may
be of interest in the domain of sociophonetics. It also deals with some problems
in the exploitation of sound archives, especially those not originally conceived for
sociophonetic analysis.
The paper is organized as follows. §2 illustrates the principles that inspire
the construction of a sound archive for spontaneous speech and individual biog-
raphies, within a typically European research stream as opposed to the correla-
tional analysis characterizing a large part of Anglo-American sociolinguistics. §3
describes the characteristics of Phlegrean diphthongs and of related phenomena
in Romance diphthongization. Since the Phlegrean territory is very complex also