COME SI PARLA ITALIANO A MALTA? PRIME EVIDENZE DI UNA MARCA SOCIOFONETICA.

This article investigates phonetic variation in Italian as spoken by native Maltese speakers, born and raised in Malta, a country with a long history of multilingualism, where Italian was an official language once and is still a prestigious and highly accessible language, largely due to its widespread diffusion through the media. The study is based on data retrieved from ten Maltese-English bilingual adults, all highly proficient in Italian. After completing an ethno-sociolinguistic questionnaire, participants took part in a semi-structured interview in Italian and completed tasks designed to collect both controlled and semi-spontaneous speech data. A contrastive phonology approach was used to select potentially relevant phonetic features, assessed via a preliminary auditory and acoustic investigation based on their perceptual salience. Consequently phonetic-acoustic analyses were carried out and the results focus on the realisation of the target /r/ in Italian as a second language and on the phonetic variants of this phoneme that can be considered a specific phonetic marker, typical of Maltese-accented Italian.