Accommodation and emergence of new phonetic variants

Mixed dental affricates in Pavia and Bolzano

Abstract

The study explores two situations of language contact between Standard Italian, Italo-Romance dialects and Italian regional varieties in two sociolinguistic settings: a university college in Pavia and a group of second or third generation of Italian immigrants in Bolzano. All speakers were aged between 19 and 35 years. The study offers an acoustic analysis of the realization of dental affricates in word-list reading. The emergence of a new degree of sonority, the so-called intermediate, is highlighted in both group. The interpretation of this phenomenon relies on the Accomodation Theory.