Across languages of the world the /r/ sound is known for its variability. This variability has been investigated using articulatory models as well as in sociolinguistic studies. The current study investigates to what extent /r/ is a marker of a bilingual's dominant language. To this end, a reading task was carried out by bilingual speakers from South Tyrol, who produce /r/ differently according to whether they dominantly speak Tyrolean or Italian. The recorded reading data were subsequently used in a perception experiment to investigate whether South Tyrolean bilingual listeners are able to identify the dominant language of the speaker. Results indicate that listeners use /r/ as a cue to determine the dominant language of the speaker whilst relying on articulatory distinctions between the variants. It is furthermore shown that /r/ correlates with three interdependent variables: the sociolinguistic background of the speakers, their speech production, and how their speech is perceived.
The relative status of dialects and Italian and the different patterns of language use have given rise to potentially different speech communities within the larger Italo-Romance domain. Such communities are mainly determined by the dimensions of geographical, social and age variation. In this paper we are going to present some of these different patterns of dialect and standard Italian, first reviewing some of the most relevant literature of the last two decades, and then analyzing the most up-dated census results concerning language use.
<p class="1">How do speakers reconstruct the boundaries of an allophonic system? In our paper, we address this question and examine how speakers organize into consistent groups of allophones the array of /r/-variants that are used in South-Tyrol Italian (STI). In addition, we discuss that this process of grouping is based on two intertwining sources of variation: the linguistic source and the socio-indexical source. We argue that the indexical dimension is not disconnected from the linguistic one, but it contributes in an essential way to its structuring.</p><p class="1">Our investigation is based on a sample of two thousand tokens of /r/. These occurrences are extracted from a corpus that includes the (semi)spontaneous productions of 14 Italian-German bilingual speakers. The analysis concerns the identification of possible relationships among the allophones with respect to (a) distributional, (b) stylistic and (c) biographical factors. Data are analyzed using a multivariate exploratory technique, namely the multiple correspondence analysis approach. The results clearly show how the aggregation of indexical and linguistic factors determines the emergence of two different allophonic subsystems, that is the Italian of Italian-dominant speakers (STI-i) and the Italian of German-dominant speakers (STI-d).</p>
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