Varieties of Italian and their intonational phonology

The Italian language is characterized by an extremely strong phonetic and phonological variation that differentiates the language across space, communicative situations, social groups and socio-economic classes, and means of communication (Berruto 2010, 2012). In this chapter, we consider the phonetic and phonological variation at the intonational and prosodic level as it is found in the varieties of Italian, that is, in the official language of Italy as spoken by speakers with different regional accents. In particular, we focus on varieties of Italian spoken in most of the areas identified in previous dialectological studies.