Everyone has an accent. Standard Italian and regional pronunciation

Abstract

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 a key factor in the restandardization 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 regional standard pronunciations. These pronunciations appear to be well established within the respective regions, although they enjoy different degrees of overt prestige when considering the whole country context.

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