Chapter 6. Sound archives and linguistic variation 179
- The diphthongal variability: Data from the archive
According to a well received view maintained by Rohlfs and other scholars, the
Phlegraean diphthongs are rather recent, which could explain their inner instabil-
ity and external variability. This theory seems far from convincing: diphthongal
trajectories are inherently unstable and highly sensitive to context, therefore the
possibility for diphthongs to keep polymorphism for centuries should not be sur-
prising. The analysis of many stretches of spontaneous spoken discourse collected
in ADICA and produced by different individuals from the Phlegraean area has
shown that the diphthongs investigated have a conspicuous number of variants.
Structural variation and intra-speaker variability phenomena are better treated
according to a variationist methodology than to a historical-grammar approach.^5
The shape of the diphthongs shows high variability across speakers. Let us
concentrate on the variants of the front mid-high vowel. The overall ranges of vari-
ants of (e) in the Phlegraean dialects can be represented as follows (see Sornicola
2003 for further details): (e) = {e, ei, ɛ, ɛi, ɛᶦ, ɛʌ, ɛᶺ, æ, əi, ʌi, ʌi, ʌe, ʌə, ʌᶹ, ʌ}.
Strong individual variation has been detected in speakers of the island of
Ischia. In a study conducted on three speakers from the village of Panza, close to
the town of Forio (Sornicola 2001), significantly different ranges of variants and
grammatical / lexical distributions emerged. Speaker I had a smaller and smoother
range of variants which can be represented as follows: (e) = {e, ei, ɛ, æ, ʌ, ʌe}
The presence of these variants in grammatical and lexical contexts is rather
uniform, as shown in Table 2.
Table 2. Grammatical and lexical contexts.
variants imperfect indicative forms nominal forms
[e] [təˈnevə] ‘I had’ [rumˈmenəka] ‘Sunday’
[ɛ] [e ssənˈtɛvə] ‘I herd them’ −
[æ] [nu bbuˈlævənə] ‘they did not want’ −
[ʌ] [puˈtʌvə] ‘I could’; [e ssənˈtʌvə] ‘he herd them’;
[kanuʃ ˈʃʌvə] ‘I knew’
[ʌe] [arraˈpʌevə] ‘I opened’; [nu bbuˈlʌevənə]
‘they did not want’;
[ʃkriˈvʌevənə] ‘they wrote’ (2 tokens);
[vəˈnʌevə] ‘I came’
[lumˈmʌenəkə] ‘Sunday’[ei] − [muλˈλeirəmə] ‘my wife’
- Rohlfs, however, was well aware of the multiple outcomes of vowel diphthongization, but
tended to attribute them to different diachronic phases and different geographic points.