Sociolinguistic variation in spoken Italian: An introduction

Abstract

In Italo-Romance, as well as in most European scenarios, the current language space between base dialects and standard results from a previous situation of 'spoken diglossia' (cf.Auer 2005).In fact, until at least the second half of the nineteenth century, Italian was used by a small minority of the population and almost exclusively in writing and formal speech; the vast majority of the population was composed of nearly monolingual dialect speakers, and local dialects were basically the sole languages for daily use.This situation evolved when socio-economic changes (such as the rise of industrial and post-industrial societies, the growing rates of people entering compulsory and post-compulsory education, the increase in internal and external mobility, and the development of mass media) brought about the massive spread of the standard language across speakers and domains of use.As a result, Italian came to be used by the majority of the population both in writing and formal speech as well as in everyday conversations (see, inter alia, De Mauro 2014; Berruto 2018).This led to the progressive conventionalization of (co-occurring) linguistic features which could meet the communicative needs of the daily activity of speaking.Such features arose partly from the well-known processes naturally appearing in many sub-standard spoken varieties across languages (cf.Chambers 2004) and partly from the retention of dialect features; contact between local dialects and standard essentially gave rise to different regional varieties of Italian, each possessing its own social and situational varieties (the distinction between inherent and contact-induced features is, however, far from clear-cut in Italo-Romance).Regional, social, and situational varieties thus emerged, and the standard language ended up becoming a 'multi-functional' language (in the sense of Mattheier 1997; cf.

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