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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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This paper aims to briefly illustrate the main segmental features
of the phonetic system of a Romance language still spoken -
together with Italian, the official language - in a small linguistic
area of southern Italy: the Salento peninsula, the “heel of the
Italian boot”.
Sallentinian, perhaps less known abroad, is well taken into
account in national studies and has an important vernacular
literature (mainly since the 18th century) with a number of
medieval texts. Even if it is well studied from an historical point
of view, instrumental phonetics surveys are still missing, though.
Given that this language - spoken by more than one million of
Salento inhabitants - is widespread in a number of slightly
differing dialects, we chose to describe only one variety, that of
Parabita. The analyses we conducted on speech make-up
collected in this village gave data which we summarise and
discuss below.
Bibliographic reference. Romano, Antonio (1999): "A phonetic study of a Sallentinian variety (southern Italy)", In ICPhS-14, 1051-1054.