A sociophonetic approach to stop consonant production in a Sardinian Italian community in Yorkshire

Abstract

This research contributes to the study of phonetic attrition and the processes of construction and maintenance of speakers’ sociolinguistic identity in migratory settings. This preliminary work focuses on Sardinian immigrants in York (UK), by analysing the maintenance or loss of characteristic phonetic features of their Sardinian Italian, in particular stop consonants. Despite these limitations, the results of the acoustic analysis show that maintaining linguistic skills in Sardinian local varieties in migration settings is important for the resistance of Sardinian stop consonants to phonetic attrition. Furthermore, being members of Sardinian communities and speakers of Sardinian is critical for maintaining speakers’ identities, especially in multilingual and multicultural environments.