Gemination in Northern versus Central and Southern Varieties of Italian: A Corpus-based Investigation

It is often claimed that patterns of gemination are different across varieties of Italian. In particular, northern speakers are sometimes said to degeminate, or to produce shorter geminates than central and southern speakers. However, experimental data proving such claims is largely missing. In this article, we perform an analysis of the CLIPS corpus with the aim of comparing gemination for northern versus central and southern speakers of Italian. The analysis of different data types (target words in isolated position, read sentences, dialogues, local radio and TV broadcasts) revealed that: (a) geminate consonants are produced by all speakers, incl. northern speakers; (b) differences in the magnitude of consonant lengthening are small (< 19 ms) and reach significance only for some data types; (c) the shortening of vowels preceding geminate consonants is mainly restricted to isolated target words in nuclear position, with no significant differences between northern and central/ southern speakers. We argue that regional differences in Italian gemination have been overestimated and overemphasized in the literature. In fact, the evidence suggests that they are not as sizeable as previously thought, probably because of the progressive standardization of the language.