For a mapping of the languages/dialects of Italy and regional varieties of Italian

Abstract : The purpose of this paper is twofold: we first describe a speaking atlas which takes the form of a website presenting an interactive map of Italy, where one can click on more than a hundred survey points to listen to speech samples and read a transcript of what is said, in local (or regional) languages. We recorded the Aesop fable “The North Wind and the Sun” (used by the International Phonetic Association to illustrate many languages of the world) in nearly 30 languages/dialects of Italy. We will focus on four of them (Ligurian, Salentine, Calabrian and Apulian) to describe their main features on phonetic, morphosyntactic and lexical levels. The second objective of the work reported here is to set up a large crowdsourcing survey to document and map pronunciation variants in regional Italian: a list of 70 words whose pronunciation is phonologically region-dependent was established and recorded with each time two possibilities (e.g. casa with /s/ or /z/). An online interface was developed, and an experiment was launched through mailing lists and social networks. Participants’ task consisted of indicating which of the two forms, for each word, would be the closer to their most common pronunciation. Near 1,000 people took part in the experiment, from more than 80 Italian provinces (out of 110). We will present the first results, exemplified by words such as stella (with a close/open-mid initial vowel) or zio (with a voiced/unvoiced affricate consonant) which were mapped out.