Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.22210/suvlin.2019.087.04
Impoverishment of phonetic inventory or changes in phonetic inventory of the Italian–speaking population in Western Slavonia
Vesna Deželjin
orcid.org/0000-0002-5370-4509
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb
Abstract
This paper focuses on sibilant and interdental fricative phones perceptible among reliable as well
as all other types of speakers of the Italian Vernacular of Western Slavonia (IVWS). The production
of fricatives in IVWS should be observed in relation to their presence in similar Italian dialectal
vernaculars, namely in northern Veneto dialects, particularly in the archaic Belluno vernacular, and
in western Friuli patois. The first research hypothesis is the proposition that a lack of correspondence in the pronunciation of certain phones can be treated as an expected phenomenon, due to the
changes that the speech community has undergone. The second hypothesis is that the absence of
some phones will be perceptible and consistent mostly among unreliable speakers and semi–speakers. The results show that the targeted phones exist in the pronunciation of mainly those speakers
who have not been in contact with modern Italian variants; at the same time, the same phones are
often substituted with near phones that exist in either modern Italian vernaculars or in the majority
Croatian language.
Keywords
sibilant and interdental fricatives; Italian vernacular of Western Slavonia; changes in phonetic inventory
Hrčak ID:
223083
URI
Publication date:
20.7.2019.
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