An Acoustic Analysis of Palatal Obstruents in Two Romance Varieties

Abstract

Palatal stops and affricates are relatively rare in the world’s languages, compared to velar stops and postalveolar affricates. In some languages, palatal stops underwent a diachronic shift and merged with postalveolar affricates. This study undertakes a spectral analysis of palatal stops in two Romance varieties, i.e. the dialect of San Giovanni in Fiore (spoken in a small town of Calabria, southern Italy) and Vallader, a variety of Romansh (spoken in the lower Engadine, Switzerland). The results indicate that the acoustic contrast between postalveolar and palatal obstruents is less robust in Vallader than in Sangiovannese, where in turn inter-speaker differences are more sizeable.