Mid vowels at the crossroads between standard and regional Italian

Abstract The variety of Italian spoken in Bolzano (South Tyrol) represents a singular case in Italy, because it is not the result of a long-term contact between standard and Italo-Romance dialects but rather the outcome of a process of levelling and koineization. In such sociolinguistic scenario, it is interesting to study phonological variability in Bolzano Italian with the aim of understanding which language varieties have possibly played a role as models from a sociolinguistic point of view. The purpose of our exploratory study is to characterize this variety within the spectrum of variation between the standard and the regional norm. In our analysis, we will focus on the set of mid vowels as a window to understand which variety of Italian BI most closely resembles. Through a corpus-based analysis, we will investigate the phonological distribution of mid vowels (for both Italian and Tyrolean speakers), in order to explore whether it can be explained on the basis of a contextual or a lexical distribution.