/s/-retraction in Cagliari Sardinian

A sociophonetic study

Abstract

This paper presents a sociophonetic study on a local stereotype of the variety of Sardinian spoken in Cagliari. In particular, the aim is to investigate the use of the realisation of the voiceless and voiced alveolar fricatives /s, z/ as a voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ], in pre-consonantal environments (also across word boundaries), e.g. tostau [toʃˈtau] ‘hard, tough’, disgràtzia [diʃˈgrattsja] ‘bad luck, disaster’. After the acoustic analysis, the paper focuses on the exploration of the patterns of stylistic variation of this variable. The results of the analysis show the activation of the substandard variant [ʃ] related to particular topics.