Tuscan between standard and vernacular: a sociophonetic perspective

In most parts of Tuscany there is a particular configuration of the linguistic repertoire and the traditional opposition between standard language vs. dialects is lacking, being the Florentine dialect at the origin of the Italian language. Code-switching is totally absent from the linguistic production of Tuscan speakers, whose speech is highly mixed up, with occurrences of several dialectal features also in formal contexts. The paper explores the relationship between standard and vernacular in Tuscany and may be considered also as a state-of-the art both on the production and the perception side, offering an update picture of the classical studies written by Luciano Giannelli in the seventies and in the eighties. In the first part, a picture of the most relevant variables occurring at the phonetic level is presented, with a particular attention to the consonantal weakening (the so-called “Gorgia Toscana”), the s-affrication, the stressed vowel systems, the raddoppiamento sintattico. Some acoustic data are discussed in order to find out the main loci of variation and the dialectal features showing a diffusion process inside the region, especially among young speakers. In the second part, some perceptual data elicited by means of the verbal-guise technique are presented, in order to evaluate how the Florentine pronunciation is perceived. Although at the supra-regional level the prestige of Florentine pronunciation is declining, it still endures inside the region; on the other hand, other sub-regional pronunciations enjoy some sort of covert prestige which may be partly responsible for the spreading of some local phonetic features.