Style and addressees in the selection of dialectal vs standard phonetic forms: Sicilian rhotics.

This study is about the production of singleton and geminate rhotics by young adult Sicilian speakers, whose native languages are Italian and a Sicilian dialect, during speech interactions with different interlocutors. As in many other languages, /r/ works as a sociolinguistic variable in the Sicilian area, conveying social and geographical information about the speaker. We will show that it also conveys information about the communicative and interactional dynamics with peers speaking either Italian or Sicilian dialects. We propose that in the process of selecting the relevant variants of the /r/ variable, the speakers are guided by the socio-communicative context and the phenomena of mutual convergence between interlocutors