Apocope in Heritage Italian

Anissa Baird,Naomi Nagy,Angela Cristiano

doi:10.3390/languages6030120

Abstract

Apocope (deletion of word-final vowels) and word-final vowel reduction are hallmarks of southern Italian varieties. To investigate whether heritage speakers reproduce the complex variable patterns of these processes, we analyze spontaneous speech of three generations of heritage Calabrian Italian speakers and a homeland comparator sample. All occurrences (N = 2477) from a list of frequent polysyllabic words are extracted from 25 speakers’ interviews and analyzed via mixed effects models. Tested predictors include: vowel identity, phonological context, clausal position, lexical frequency, word length, gender, generation, ethnic orientation and age. Homeland and heritage speakers exhibit similar distributions of full, reduced and deleted forms, but there are inter-generational differences in the constraints governing the variation. Primarily linguistic factors condition the variation. Homeland variation in reduction shows sensitivity to part of speech, while heritage speakers show sensitivity to segmental context and part of speech. Slightly different factors influence apocope, with suprasegmental factors and part of speech significant for homeland speakers, but only part of speech for heritage speakers. Surprisingly, for such a socially marked feature, few social factors are relevant. Factors influencing reduction and apocope are similar, suggesting the processes are related.

Highlights

Heritage language (HL) sociolinguistics generally targets “conflict sites” (Poplack and Meechan 1998), that is, portions of a language that differ from the majority language (English, in many HL studies), in order to determine the degree of influence of English on the given heritage language
Homeland: speaker has always lived in southern Calabria, and has southern Calabrian parents2 ; Generation 1 (Gen1): speaker has lived at least their first 18 years in Calabria and has lived in the Greater Toronto Area ( Toronto) for at least 20 years; Generation 2 (Gen2): parents qualify as Generation 1 and speaker was either born in Toronto or arrived before age six; Generation 3 (Gen3): parents qualify as Generation 2 and speaker was born in Toronto
We considered a selection of ethnic orientation (EO) scores, each corresponding to averaged, quantified responses from one section of the HLVC Ethnic

Summary

Introduction

Heritage language (HL) sociolinguistics generally targets “conflict sites” (Poplack and Meechan 1998), that is, portions of a language that differ from the majority language (English, in many HL studies), in order to determine the degree of influence of English on the given heritage language. This paper examines an indigenous pattern of variation, one that appears in non-heritage varieties and, is not attributable directly to contact effects of the majority language in the heritage context. In this first empirical sociolinguistic investigation of the two related phenomena of word-final vowel reduction and apocope (word-final vowel deletion) in Italian, our primary goal is to establish the distribution of contexts in which full, reduced and deleted word-final vowels occur.

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