Gorgia Toscana in terra emiliana (Tuscan Gorgia in Emilia): Spirantization in Florentines who migrated to Emilia-Romagna, a sociophonetic study

Abstract

The study is one of the first attempts to apply the Second Dialect Acquisition studies framework on Italian varieties’ contact due to internal migration. It proposes an analysis of intervocalic voiceless stop realizations by four Florentine speakers living in Emilia Romagna for more than twenty years, as compared to those of four Florentine speakers who always lived in Florence. The aim is to observe if speakers who moved away from Florence maintained the typical Florentine spirantization (Gorgia Toscana, GT) or if they reduced their trait, as a consequence of accommodation toward a northern pronunciation. From the analysis, a GT reduction in Emilia-Romagna speakers emerged, interpreted as levelling within the discussion.

The effect of the level of education, besides gender, on accommodation is one of our main findings, which confirms the relevance of prestige dynamics in varieties’ contact.

Moreover, the introduction of linguistic factors, such as phoneme involved (/k t p/), stress and accent, helped to clarify the effect of salience and prominence on both accommodation and the spirantization phenomena.