Author:

Keywords:

Social Sciences, Communication, Linguistics, Language & Linguistics, standard language ideology, verbal guise experiment, regional pronunciation, language attitudes, prestige

Abstract:

This chapter investigates native speakers' attitudes towards accent variation in regionally flavored neo-standard Italian. Literary standard Italian has undergone a process of downward convergence towards spoken, regional and stylistically informal varieties, eventually leading to the emergence of a composite new standard, the so-called 'neo-standard Italian'. Up to now, neo-standard Italian has been investigated predominantly from a descriptive perspective. Our aim is to further our understanding of the social meaning of that new standard, by investigating whether the restandardization process, and thus the progressive acceptance of regional varieties of the new standard, is visible in the attitudes of southern Italian speakers. We set up a verbal guise experiment, where we asked a sample of 209 listeners to rate nine speech samples. One speech sample was in standard Italian, while the remaining eight samples were representative of the main regional varieties (viz. two for the varieties of Lombardy, Tuscany, Lazio, and Campania). The results clearly pattern along generational cohorts, potentially pointing out to a change in standard language ideology. The data show a trend in decreasing dissatisfaction with the Milanese variety, clearing the way for acceptance as "best language", but also a decreasing appreciation of Neapolitan Italian, the variety closest to the participants of the verbal guise experiment and nowadays notably the most stigmatized of the varieties taken into account.