The outcomes of the geminate lateral in the South of Italy and their conservation in certain types of linguistic community

Abstract

This paper deals with the multiple developments of the geminate lateral consonant in Southern Italian Dialects. After considering the broader Romance area affected by changes to this phonetic segment, it focuses on the structural properties of the variants, their distribution across word classes and their diatopic diffusion in the upper regions of Southern Italy, with a particular focus on Campania. The latter area is particularly interesting as in a relatively small space it presents most of the forms that are otherwise scattered across the whole South of Italy and Sicily. The comparison between the evolution of the lateral consonant in Romance dialects and its evolution in the dialects of Greek offers us a parallel that helps highlight the relevant pathways of change. The loss and preservation of consonantal quantity emerge as two fundamental factors that may have been responsible for the diverging developments of the variants (notably, the rhotacised variants as opposed to the cacuminal (henceforth retroflex), dental, approximant and palatalised variants). Two main explanations of the origin of the Romance polymorphism of the lateral segment have been put forward: the Mediterranean substratum hypothesis and the polygenesis hypothesis. We argue in favour of the latter, drawing on recent phonetic research on the lateral segments that points to this type of consonant’s inherent articulatory instability. The final part of the work is devoted to a closer analysis of the variants that occur in Campania and their diffusion. It is argued that the different patterns of preservation concerning the variants correlate with different types of linguistic community.