Ortona's Dialect Wine Dictionary

My study attempts to collect, in a dictionary, the lexicon of viticulture in Ortona’s dialect (Abruzzi, Italy). The first section covers all the vine morphology’s words. It is followed by a short section about the local vine varieties. It gets on to the procedures of the preparation of the soil for planting, followed by the pruning and all the steps of the annual growth cycle of grapevines. The second half of the work relates to the vocabulary of the grape harvest and the winemaking. Eventually a section about vine diseases concludes the collection. Every part includes explanations of the procedures and descriptions of the tools used during them. The vocabulary is the outcome of the interviews I conducted with 8 informants: countrymen of both sexes with an age range of 67-90, living in 5 different districts – both inland and coastal ones. All the interviews have been recorded and then, after compiling the data, transcribed into the IPA. The data has been collected through semi-structured interviews based on a schedule, built on top of information obtained studying similar research and technical works on agriculture. I have observed an interesting quantity of diatopic and diastratic variation, both on the phonetic and on the semantic level. An example of the diatopic variation is vītə ['vi:tə], that means ‘vine’ according to the informers from the inland, but it also means ‘trunk’ according to the coastal ones. Or, looking at the diastratic variation, in this case associated with sex, ‘leaf’ is for all the interviewed men pàmbələ ['pambələ] – with some phonetic differences among the interviewee –, but it is fòiə ['fɔ:jə] or frónnə ['fronnə] – an Italianized version and an hyperonym, respectively – for the two women, which tend to generalize, being less involved personally in the farming. In another noteworthy case I found a shifting of a vowel in the word ‘must’ which is stable when the word is uttered in isolation, but unstable in utterances where the word is part of a phrase. On the one hand we have mmoštə ['mmoʃtə] for ‘must’, on the other hand the variation between mmuəštə cottə ['mmwəʃtə 'kottə], mməštə cottə ['mməʃtə 'kottə] and mmištə cottə ['mmiʃtə 'kottə] for ‘cooked must’.