Claudia Crocco

Everyone has an accent : standard Italian and regional pronunciation

Contemporary Italian shows noticeable regional differences from the phonetic and phonological point of view. This fragmentation has its roots in the differences in the dialectal substratum and in the way Italian has spread as a spoken language after the political unification. Traditional Standard pronunciation of Italian is the so-called amended Florentine pronunciation, corresponding to the cultivated Florentine pronunciation purified from local features. In the Twentieth century other model pronunciations have been proposed, such as the one based on the Italian pronunciation of Florence and Rome. However, none of these models has effectively spread among educated speakers nor has become the native pronunciation of at least a socially or geographically defined group of Italians. School teachers, often themselves unfamiliar with orthoepy, have not discouraged the use of pronunciations affected by the phonology of the substratum dialects, while often promoting the use of spelling-pronunciation. Standard pronunciation is therefore a highly artificial one, mostly used by professional speakers of national radio broadcast and by theatre actors. Pronunciation represents as key factor in the re-standardization process of Standard Italian. The demotization of the standard language has resulted in a remarkable diatopic differentiation of spoken Italian. Furthermore, the regional fragmentation of the spoken language has promoted the formation of regiolects and regional varieties and has also given an impulse to restandardization with the formation of standard pronunciations. Regional standard pronunciations appear to be well established within the respective regions, although they enjoy different degrees of overt prestige when considering the whole country context.

The neo-standard of Italy and elsewhere in Europe

This epilogue tentatively puts the Italian neo-standard in a European perspective by outlining some of the parallel developments in other European languages, particularly German. The notion of a neo-standard is profiled against related concepts such as regional standards and regional sub-standards. The relationship between demoticization and destandardization is discussed.

How standard regional Italians set in: the case of standard Piedmontese Italian

This chapter will focus on standard Piedmontese Italian, i.e. the standard variety of Italian spoken and written in the northwestern region of Piedmont. First of all, I will sketch the sociolinguistic dynamics lying beneath the formation of both regional and standard regional Italian, and discuss the concepts of destandardization and restandardization, with relation to the ItaloRomance context. I will then examine three syntactic features lato sensu, their degree of standardness in Piedmontese Italian being tentatively proved by their occurrence in spoken and written model texts: 1) a phonotactic phenomenon, i.e. the selection of the definitive articles lo ‘the’ (singular) and gli ‘the’ (plural) before suocero ‘father-in-law’ / suoceri ‘fathers-in-law’, whereas standard Italian would only allow the selection of il and i (thus, il suocero / i suoceri); 2) a lexical/ morphosyntactic element, i.e. the focus particle solo più ‘lit. only more’, which has no correspondent in standard Italian; and 3) a morphosyntactic construction, i.e. the omission of the preverbal negation when a postverbal negative quantifier or a postverbal negative reinforcer is used (e.g. importa niente ‘it does not matter’, lit. ‘it matters nothing’, as opposed to standard Italian non importa niente, lit. ‘it does not matter nothing’). The interpretation of the data will be suggested in terms of both simplification/complexification patterns, assessing if a new standard feature simplifies or complicates the linguistic system, and source language/recipient language agentivity, following Frans Van Coetsem’s model of language contact phenomena.

Changes from below, changes from above: relative constructions in contemporary Italian

This chapter addresses the range of relative const ructions in contemporary Italian as a case in point for the investigation of the main sociolingui stic dynamics characterizing the ongoing process of restandardization. I assume that standard Italian d oes not coincide with the highest poles of diaphasi a and diastratia, and hence that there exist varietie s lower than standard (i.e. informal speech and low social varieties), referred to as ub-standard varieties, and varieties higher than standard (i.e bureaucratic, refined formal and educated varieties ), r ferred to as upra-standard varieties. Drawing on the results of recent corpus-based studies, evid ence will be presented to show that both some substandard relative constructions and some supra-stan dard relative constructions are actually moving towards neo-standard Italian. Such changes may fit in with the Labovian distinction between changes from below and changes from above: sub-standard con structions are extending their reach beyond the vernacular by being used in speech across social cl asses (a few of them are even emerging in written formal varieties), while supra-standard constructio ns are emerging in model texts as prestigious features introduced by highly educated social class es (and do not occur in the vernacular).

Towards a New Standard. Theoretical and Empirical Studies on the Restandardization of Italian

In many European languages the National Standard Variety is converging with spoken, informal, and socially marked varieties. In Italian this process is giving rise to a new standard variety called Neo-standard Italian, which partly consists of regional features. This book contributes to current research on standardization in Europe by offering a comprehensive overview of the re-standardization dynamics in Italian. Each chapter investigates a specific dynamic shaping the emergence of Neo-standard Italian and Regional Standard Varieties, such as the acceptance of previously non-standard features, the reception of Old Italian features excluded from the standard variety, the changing standard language ideology, the retention of features from Italo-Romance dialects, the standardization of patterns borrowed from English, and the developmental tendencies of standard Italian in Switzerland. The contributions investigate phonetic/phonological, prosodic, morphosyntactic, and lexical phenomena, addressed by several empirical methodologies and theoretical vantage points. This work is of interest to scholars and students working on language variation and change, especially those focusing on standard languages and standardization dynamics.