Identifying language varieties: Coexisting standards in spoken Italian

In many parts of Europe, the mass diffusion of the standard language has not only resulted in the emergence and/or stabilization of informal spoken and socio-geographic varieties but has also affected the standard norm itself, which has ceased to conform only to the written language. In fact, several informal spoken features (as well as some low-status and regional ones) are now accepted as standard even in formal and educated speech and, to a certain extent, in formal and educated writing as well. Thus, one might question whether the traditional standard variety has changed, since some of its features have yielded to formerly sub-standard variants, or whether it has remained basically stable and come to coexist with a newly-emerged standard variety which includes many informal spoken features. New standard varieties have apparently emerged across Europe. These new varieties are displacing the traditional standard varieties in some public domains, e.g., modern media, but remain disregarded in others, e.g., school education. Nevertheless, only a few of these newly-emerged standards are actually characterized by features co-occurring on a statistically significant basis. Other newly-emerged standards, for which statistically robust clusterings of features cannot be detected, are perceived as language varieties on the basis of salient linguistic features and established language ideologies. This chapter deals with the coherence of a newly-emerged standard variety of Italian, i.e., the so-called neo-standard Italian, as compared with the traditional standard variety. The study aims to test whether, and to what extent, linguistic features which are conventionally associated with these two standard varieties co-occur in actual speech data. In particular, our pilot analysis is based on a corpus of various types of spoken interactions involving university students; the relationship among linguistic features will therefore be observed in students’ usage and across different types of interactions. Section 14.2 briefly outlines the relevant theoretical background, along with the research questions; Section 14.3 describes the methodology, as well as the linguistic variables under scrutiny; Section 14.4 presents and discusses the research results; and, finally, Section 14.5 relates the outcomes of the study to some of the broader issues concerning linguistic coherence.