Inter-speaker accommodation and within-dialect variability. Dental affricates and fricative realisation in Marchigiano

This study examines the acoustic properties of interactions among speakers of Le Marche’s regional variety of Italian. The target population are Italian speakers of two provinces of Le Marche region, Ancona and Macerata, aged 22-26. In particular, this study investigates how social and linguistic variables such as sex and origin influence the speakers’ production of complex (or ‘marked’) sounds like affricates and fricatives during interactions. Data was collected by a background questionnaire, a reading and an interactive task. Results have shown that speakers of different origin tend to accommodate to one another, thus signalling their desire of being included in the interlocutor’s linguistic group, whereas those belonging to the same province tend to mark their own characteristics flagging their membership to the same ‘social’ group. Moreover, following Labov’s theories, women accommodate only towards the variants that are perceived as ‘socially prestigious’, being those of Macerata.