Chapter 6. Sound archives and linguistic variation 177
Although a certain number of geographical variants of both vowels are reported
for other places of upper southern Italy, Rohlfs transcribes as
opment from [e], and as
and Procida (see Table 1).
Table 1. Diphthongized variants from [e] and [o].
open syllable closed syllablee > [ai] naivə ‘snow’; vainə ‘vein’ jənaistrə ‘broom’; sajaittə ‘small boat’;
saikka ‘slim’; aissa ‘she’
o > [au] vauçə ‘voice’; nauçə ‘nut’; çaurə ‘flower’;
saulə ‘alone’; nəpautə ‘nephew/niece’
saurdə ‘deaf (fem.)’; raussə ‘red (fem.)’Rohlfs recognizes that diphthongization influences vowels unaffected by the char-
acteristic Neapolitan metaphony. For this reason the diphthongs we are dealing
with have traditionally been called ‘spontaneous’ in the Italian dialectology lit-
erature. In some places, notably Pozzuoli and Forio d’ Ischia, the ‘spontaneous’
diphthongal processes affect all vowels, except [a].^4
The Phlegraen diphthongs pose both structural and dialectological questions.
Structural aspects can be summarized as follows:
a. high polymorphism (several vocalic variables are involved);
b. syllable-independence;
c. correlation to prosodic factors (a word such as pisci ‘fishes’ can be rendered as
[pɤɪʃː] before phrase boundaries, while it will be rendered as [piʃʃ] in internal
position).
Dialectological questions can be described as follows: several scholars observed
an apparent connection between the diphthongs of the Tyrrhenian coast located
in the North of Naples (in particular, the islands of Ischia and Procida), and those
occurring in the Adriatic region (Abruzzo, Molise, Apulia), which show a similar
range of variants. Diphthongization of stressed mid vowels has been described
for various places of Upper Southern Italy in the traditional dialectological litera-
ture. It was first pointed out by Salvioni (1911) that these processes have a pecu-
liar geographical distribution on the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic sides of Italy (the
Phlegraean area and Abruzzi and Apulia respectively), which led the Swiss scholar
to identify a ‘Tyrrhenian-Adriatic corridor’ (for a discussion see Sornicola 2006a).
- For Pozzuoli, a more accurate phonetic representation of stressed vowels, which also takes
into account their developments from Latin and the systemic relationships between metapho-
netic and ‘spontaneous’ diphthongs, has recently been put forward by Abete (2011) and Abete
& Simpson (2010).