Degemination in marginal Tuscan speech: temporal analysis in legacy speech data

Elba Island speech appears to be the least vigorous among the varieties of Tuscan; it presents several conservative features, showing at the same time influences from Southern and Corsican dialects. A noteworthy feature of Elba vernacular speech is the degemination of /rr/ (e.g., /ˈtɛrːa/ It. terra ‘land’ Elb. [ˈtɛːra]), which appears to be rather common, at least in middle-aged speakers, and whose geolinguistic distribution elsewhere in Tuscany has yet to be fully characterized. Degeminated /rr/ is reported in the western part of the region but it is occasionally documented in the Florentine area as well, especially in elderly and rural speakers. In both areas the degemination of /ll/ and /ff/ is occasionally attested too (e.g., [ˈdeːla] It. della, ‘of the’, [difeˈrɛnte] It. differente ‘different’). This research investigates the prevalence of degemination of long consonants in Elba Island speech by analysing audio material from an oral history corpus collected for other purposes by the historian Tiziana Noce between 1999 and 2001. The speech archive is made up of about 30 hours of recorded interviews, dealing with the life histories of more than 30 male and female speakers, mostly miners, seafarers, laborers, and housewives. Although the speech archive appears to be highly multi-faceted, given the type, number, and variability of factors involved, it is particularly well suited for an initial sociophonetic study on degemination, considering the fact that this particular sound change is likely to occur mostly in spontaneous speech. Given the particular status of the degemination variable in conveying socio-indexical information, the present research also analyses whether speech referring to events that took place in the more distant past is more likely to contain older degeminated variants. The paper also discusses the implications of the use and reuse of older audio recordings for purposes of sociophonetic research.