Italian Roots in Australian Soil. Dynamics of contact and cross-linguistic phonetic influence in first-generation heritage speakers

In this work, we investigate dialectal productions of four first-generation Italo-Australian speakers from Northern Veneto, who moved to Sydney in the mid-late 1950s. The specific aim of this research is to test if and to which extent the fine phonetic properties of the native language can resist the attrition of later-acquired Australian English, as these two systems partially share a comparable phonological inventory but differ for the phonetic content of the target sounds in common. To explore phenomena of maintenance, loss, and restructuring in first-generation Italo-Australians – who exhibit local dialect as L1, regional Italian as L2, and Australian English as L3 – we employ speech data extracted from the IRIAS (Italian Roots in Australian Soil) corpus, and acoustically analyze a subset of L1 coronal fricatives: [θ, s, ʃ] and L1 vowels [i, ɛ, e, a, ɔ, o, u]. Experimental analyses show that, although there are some manifestations at acoustic level of "regressive transfer" from L3 to L1, target phonetic features of immigrants’ native dialect are substantially preserved with a high degree of stability. To assess the effects of cross-linguistic influence from L3 to L1, dialectal productions were compared to those of four ad-hoc-recorded Italian control informants, who were born and currently live in the same areas of origin of the four first-generation Italo-Australian speakers.