170 Rosanna Sornicola and Silvia Calamai
from the historical point of view, some diachronic aspects will also be discussed.
§4 deals with the variability of diphthongs as attested in the sound archive under
examination. In the final part of this section, two fundamental aspects of a socio-
phonetic research based on archive data are discussed. First, archives contain rela-
tively uncontrolled, sometimes relaxed speech styles, that are not usually included
in the speech databases used in sociophonetic research. Second, archives allow us
to study in a historical perspective (specifically, according to the real time para-
digm) some phonetic phenomena that would otherwise be known only for their
most recent or contemporary manifestations.- Sound archives for sociophonetic analysis
Sound archives are important resources for sociophonetic analysis. Oral his-
tory interview recordings, ethnographic field and traditional music recordings,
vernacular speech, local and regional languages recordings offer an enormous
amount of material that can be exploited for the observation of the fine phonetic
detail of phonological processes. A renewed interest in sound archives is currently
visible in various parts of the world, at least since the UNESCO Convention for
the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of October 17th, 2003. To
prevent the irreversible deterioration of analogical storage devices, sound archives
are digitalized, catalogued, and published online. Several notable examples can
be cited: in Europe, we should mention the activity of the Phonotèque of the
Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme in Aix-en-Provence (http://
phonotheque.mmsh.univ-aix.fr/) as well as the activity of the Phonogram Archive
of the University of Zurich (http http://www.phonogrammarchiv.uzh.ch/). As for
Italy, the project Grammo-foni, Le soffitte della Voce (http://grafo.sns.it) is aimed at
recovering Tuscan sound archives (Calamai 2011; Calamai & Bertinetto 2012). For
the most part, the sound archives digitalized in Grammo-foni were originally con-
ceived for a variety of purposes, including historical, sociological, anthropological
and demological. The majority of the sound archives available for consultation are
not originally conceived by sociophoneticians and one may ask whether they can
usefully be exploited for the purposes of sociophonetic research as well and, if they
can, whether they can benefit sociophonetic research and how. The presence of
speech styles normally absent or underrepresented in traditional phonetic analysis
is a benefit in itself, especially for those phenomena that are typically present in
less controlled speech, as the following sections of this paper will show.
The sound archive collected at the University of Naples since the beginning of
2000 has an intermediate character, with respect to the above, in the sense that it