Italian roots in Australian soil: dialect as heritage language in first generation bilinguals

We will discuss the maintenance of the heritage Dialect coronal fricatives in the speech of Italian-Australian trilinguals (Dialect/Italian/English) originating from North Veneto, Italy, as compared to the variability found in the productions of comparable Italian-Australian trilinguals originating from Central Veneto. Results on coronal fricatives’ distribution based on narrow phonetic trancriptions and on their acoustic characteristics based on spectral moments analysis show that the immigrants have generally maintained the fine-grained features of their Dialect. After more than five decades of residence in Australia, traces of interlinguistic influences exerted by L3-English are evident in one speaker only. We consider both internal (linguistic) and external (sociolinguistic) factors for this difference in maintenance of first language speech features between immigrants from two geographical areas of the same province of origin in Italy (Veneto).