Micro-Diachronic Corpora for Measuring the Lexical Change of Spontaneous Speech in Florence Compared to Standard Italian

This paper aims to give a realistic measure of the distance between the spoken lexicon used by Florentine people in 1965 and current standard Italian, and to evaluate the changes that occurred in the last forty years. To this purpose, we compared the lexicons derived from two spoken resources collected in the Florence area: the STAMMERJOHANN corpus (1965) and a specifically designed sampling of the LABLITA corpus (recordings after the year 2000). The pan-Italianness of the language spoken in Florence has been evaluated by means of a parallel annotation of the same corpora performed by two Italian linguists born respectively in Northern and Southern Italy. Results show that the overall percentage of regional forms in the spontaneous speech of Florence, albeit generally limited, has undergone a significant reduction over the last decades, while the high-frequency lexicon has remained more stable.