Durations of voiceless stops in a Sardinian variety

This paper presents a phonetic study of the duration of voiceless stops in Campidanese, a Sardinian variety spoken primarily in the south of the island. Only a few Sardinian dialects consider the phonological quantity as a feature to distinguish minimal pairs and this emerges only for selected speech sounds, namely nasals and liquids. The pronunciation of Italian by Sardinian usually shows unexpected gemination or degemination of several sounds, thus determining a dialectal feature of many areas of Sardinia, including Campidano and the city of Cagliari. The study allows the acknowledgement of a general degree of control by speakers of this area in the duration of these sounds in consonant clusters but reveals a duration boost for singletons surrounding stressed vowels. Voiceless stops do not show length as a distinctive feature but present a significant lengthening which could be triggered by prosodic conditions.