Impoverishment of phonetic inventory or changes in phonetic inventory of the Italian–speaking population in Western Slavonia
Impoverishment of phonetic inventory or changes in phonetic inventory of the Italian–speaking population in Western Slavonia

Summary/Abstract: This paper focuses on sibilant and interdentally fricative phones perceptible among reliable as well as all other types of speakers of the Italian Vernacular of Western Slavonia (IVWS). The production of fricatives in IVWS should be observed in relation to their presence in similar Italian dialectal vernaculars, namely in northern Veneto dialects, particularly in the archaic Belluno vernacular, and in western Friuli patois. The first research hypothesis is the proposition that a lack of correspondence in the pronunciation of certain phones can be treated as an expected phenomenon, due to the changes that the speech community has undergone. The second hypothesis is that the absence of some phones will be perceptible and consistent mostly among unreliable speakers and semi–speakers. The results show that the targeted phones exist in the pronunciation of mainly those speakers who have not been in contact with modern Italian variants; at the same time, the same phones are often substituted with near phones that exist in either modern Italian vernaculars or in the majority Croatian language.

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