The Italian(s) of first generation migrants in Australia: A first exploration of phonetic features

The linguistic history of Italian migration to Australia is characterised by long-term evolution involving three different language varieties. The so-called first generation, who arrived in the decades after WWII, today speaks dialect and regional Italian as well as English. Starting from a corpus of semi-structured interviews in Italian with first generation migrants, in this exploratory study we focus on the appearance of specific phonetic features in the speech of a sample of speakers originally from three different regions (Veneto, Tuscany and Sicily respectively) — in order to see if there is any convergence towards a shared local form of Italian, as well as any evidence of attrition or loss due to exposure to English. What emerges is that, after more than half a century in Australia, the Italian spoken by our subjects still presents phonetic features that are known to be characteristic of the same regional varieties as spoken in Italy today. At the same time, there is also limited evidence of phonetic contact effects with English (e.g. the presence of velarized /ɫ/, and post alveolar approximant /ɹ/).