Sociolinguistic variation in spoken Italian
An introduction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19437656 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Silvia Ballarè (0000-0002-5568-1611, University of Bologna Bologna Italy, corresponding author), Massimo Cerruti (University of Turin Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici via S. Ottavio 20 Torino Italy) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-15 |
| Publication date | 2023-07-12 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Sociolinguistica - International Yearbook of European Sociolinguistics / Internationales Jahrbuch für europäische Soziolinguistik (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0933-1883 • E-ISSN: 1865-939X |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/soci-2023-0004 |
| OpenAlex | W4366086579 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 33 |
Language varieties in Italo-RomanceIn 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
Astronomy · Linguistics · Physics · Sociolinguistics · Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies
Europe's sociolinguistic unity, or
The convergence and divergence of dialects in Europe. New and not so new developments in an old area
On the Social Forces that Determine what is Standard in a Language and on Conditions of Successful Implementation
Native speaker–non-native speaker interaction
Morphosyntactic variation
System-oriented and speaker-oriented approaches in Italian sociolinguistics
Italian and Italo-Romance dialects
Standardization patterns and dialect/standard convergence
The sound pattern of Standard Italian, as compared with the varieties spoken in Florence, Milan and Rome
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |