La rappresentazione grafica dei suoni dialettali nel panorama linguistico salentino

The linguistic landscape of the Italian Salento is heterogeneous in terms of the graphic choices made by Salentino writers. Indeed, the dialect spoken in Salento has no established written standard, so the trend appears to be to primarily rely on Italian orthographic norm. Consequently, for the Salentino writers it's not easy to represent sounds that are not found in the Italian phonology. This paper investigates the graphic solutions adopted in the linguistic landscape of 77 Salento towns to represent the retroflex consonant, the voiceless postalveolar fricative, syntactic gemination and consonant lengthening in writing. The use of diacritics and of graphemes that are not common in the Italian script is also documented. Data show how the absence of orthographic norms in Salento leads both to a high variability, and to a general adherence to the Italian system. The result is often a hiding of phonetic and phonological forms that are typical of Salentino.