Chapter 6. Sound archives and linguistic variation 183
- Building sound archives to study linguistic variation
The high variability of the diphthongization of Plegrean /e/ can be compared with
analogous phenomena occurring in different Romance dialects. As stated in §2, the
Phlegrean area is located on the border of an extended area whose most relevant
feature is the liveliness of spontaneous diphthongization, with particular regard
to mid vowels. In the Romance-speaking domain, this area includes the Adriatic
coast from Romagna to Abruzzo and Apulia, but also Franco-provençal dialects,
the Rheto-romance domain, together with the Dalmatian dialect (Sornicola 2003).
Spontaneous diphthongization appears also in Tuscany (in Leghorn, but also in
Arezzo; Calamai 2004, 2012). Experimental studies are still in their early stages
and they do not usually consider uncontrolled speech styles. Yet the focus on
controlled speech styles runs the risk of missing highly variable phenomena such
as those treated in the present study.
A dialect sound archive focused on spontaneous speech, in addition to
showing its potentials for a diatopic and therefore strictly dialectological analy-
sis, undoubtedly has a sociolinguistic, and especially diaphasic, value. It allows
the study of certain variables which, at first, show a high degree of instability.
Phenomena like spontaneous diphthongization usually occur below the speaker’s
level of consciousness, are the product of spontaneous speech, do not show any
correlation with classical sociolinguistic parameters and clearly represent a prob-
lem for the traditional description of the grammar of a dialect. The social distri-
bution of this phenomenon lacks a clear pattern of variation in terms of age, sex,
and social class. Strong individual variability has been detected in various places of
the area: as demonstrated in §3, diphthongs irregularly occur in the spontaneous
speech of a large part of the population. The sociolinguistic role of professional
groups is unclear, although fishermen stand out as the social group that most
regularly produces them. Precisely for these reasons, Phlegrean diphthongs call
for a stylistic analysis. The study of the differences in the levels of production and
consciousness and of the sometimes apparently unjustified changes in style, which
can be offered by a spontaneous speech archive, is essential not only for under-
standing stylistic variation, but also for variation in a more general sense. The
differences in the levels of production and consciousness are precious instruments
for a hermeneutics of texts and speakers. This is a crucial point for sociolinguistics
moving back towards dialectology: how can we, from a hermeneutic point of view,
use the differences between the speakers, and their microhistories, to investigate
intra-speaker variation? The hesitations in the choice or production of certain
variants, and the changes in motivation or attitudes causing intratextual varia-
tion, have always been at the core of Romance dialectological tradition. Suffice it
to think of the work notes of the Atlante Italo-Svizzero (Jaberg & Jud 1928–1949),