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Older people living in some rural areas north of Venice use the voiceless dental fricative /θ/ for many words, like cena "supper" which is pronounced θena, exactly like in Spanish cena (Castilian, not Latin American) while in Italian the pronunciation is t͡ʃena. Other examples can be graθie for grazie, θereza for ciliegia "cherry" and so on.

The /θ/ sound was allegedly introduced by a Greek saint during his evangelization of those areas, and it remains as a legacy of his origin since it corresponds to the Greek letter theta. I've read than one can even trace the path followed by the saint by looking at the places where this sound is still being used, from Venice and up to Padua, Vicenza, Treviso, and Belluno in the Alps mountains. Towns located a few miles apart didn't adopt the theta at all.

I don't know whether this story is true or not, but I'd be happy if it could be confirmed! Anyway, despite its respectable origin, the /θ/ spoken in those parts of Italy is today unequivocally associated with poorly educated people, especially of older generations and living outside the big cities. The Venetian dialect and its variants are still widely used throughout the Venice region, including every urban area, but the vast majority of people never use the /θ/ sound, which has a decidedly "peasant" connotation. It is generally replaced with /s/ or /tz/, so in the example above θena becomes sena, which is perfectly acceptable in any conversation and in theatrical works spoken in dialect, where the use of /θ/ is absolutely out of question!

This stigmatization may be difficult to grasp for English or other non-Italian speakers, but it makes perfect sense for an Italian as it doesn't exist in our alphabet and it is so distinctly different from all the other phonemes we use.

My grandparents didn't speak with the /θ/, but sometimes they'd throw in words with this sound to stress the fact that they grew up pronouncing words this way but then they became more educated, and also to mock people that still speak in dialect this way!

Is there any other example of phoneme stigmatization, not necessarily associated with the level of education but in any other context?

Sir Cornflakes
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betelgeuse
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    That "Greek saint" explanation sounds extremely unlikely to me. Why would someone who spoke Greek be tempted to use [θ] in completely unrelated words in Venetian? Greeks are perfectly capable of pronouncing the sounds /s/, /z/, /ts/ and /dz/. It sounds like the silly, definitely false legend that [θ] in Castillian Spanish orginates from a king with a lisp (the defining feature of a lisp is not the use of [θ], but the inability to pronounce ordinary [s], and standard Castilian Spanish maintains a distinction between these two sounds, which would be impossible for someone who lisped). – brass tacks Jul 01 '17 at 00:27
  • Your reply makes perfect sense, especially in the light on the Spanish legend. But it's still possible - nothing proven, just my speculation - that those ancient Venetian people had a true veneration for this supposed figure, and they started using the [θ], in an attempt to be closer to him and have a better grasp of his teachings, or to revive his memory after he left and strengthen their faith. You know, think of how charismatic people and celebrities are imitated all the time. – betelgeuse Jul 01 '17 at 01:12
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    That is really not how languages tend to evolve. This Romance phoneme originated from Latin /k/ after changes likely involving palatalization and turning into /t͡s/, from which, different daughter languages had different outcomes, including /θ/ in parts of Spain, /s/ in others and in French and Occitan, and /t͡ʃ/ in Italian and Romanian. These are the "big" Romance languages, but as you mention, languages like Venetian don't necessarily have the same outcome as the country's official language. Why can't it have developed into /θ/ like in Spanish, but eventually /s/ except in some lects? – LjL Jul 01 '17 at 02:05
  • @LjL In regard to your last question, the link between Venetian and Spanish has been widely attested. Despite been considered an Italian dialect Venetian is actually more closely related to Spanish (and French) than to Italian. Similarities include voicing of some intervocalic consonants and apocope of final vowels. Being a Venetian speaker myself, when I came to the US it took me less than 6 months to learn Spanish from my new Latin American friends. I've never been able to find out why these two languages are so close though – betelgeuse Jul 01 '17 at 03:40
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    Reminds me of the concept of a shibboleth: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth – Golden Cuy Jul 01 '17 at 14:08
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    The Cockney realisation of /θ/ as [f] comes to mind. – Colin Fine Jul 01 '17 at 17:21
  • @betelgeuse if by "link" you just mean that they are phonologically similar, fair enough (so are Spanish and Greek, for example)... but since you actually said they are related, which is a phylogenetic claim, can you provide some references? Among the many classifications Wikipedia proposes, Ibero-Romance is pretty much the only one that's not mentioned as a possibility. The similarities you mention are nonspecific, as they occur (often to greater extents than Venetian or Spanish) in almost all non-Eastern Romance languages. – LjL Jul 03 '17 at 13:05
  • @LjL I agree that Spanish and Greek sound very similar, despite Greek being not Romance, however Spanish and Venetian go way beyond a mere phonological similarity. Some words and phrases are pronounced and written exactly the same; – betelgeuse Jul 04 '17 at 17:24
  • Here are some reference. I was the first to be surprised when I’ve read about the Venetian being closer to Spanish than to Italian:

    https://www.omniglot.com/writing/venetian.htm

    http://vaultingvellum.blogspot.com/2008/12/venetian-dialetto.html

    http://www.venipedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=Venetian_Language

    https://en.bywiki.com/wiki/Talk:Venetian_language

    https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/a-look-at-the-venetian-and-friulian-languages/

     – betelgeuse Jul 04 '17 at 23:13
  • Please have a look at the pronunciation of these words and phrases.

    it’s my turn me toca a mi [me ‘toka a mi] – sp me toca a mi [me ‘toka a mi] – ve tocca a me [‘tokka a me] – it

    it seems that se diria que [se di’ri.a ke] – sp se diria che [se di’ri.a ke] – ve si direbbe che [si di’rebbe ke) – it

    clown payaso [pa’yaso]– sp paiaso [pa’yaso]– ve pagliaccio [pa’ʎattʃo] - it

    to sit sentarse [sen’tarse] – sp sentarse [sen’tarse] – ve sedersi [se’dersi] – it

     – betelgeuse Jul 04 '17 at 23:22
  • Sorry for the awful format, it seems I'm not able to add a linebreak by entering two spaces – betelgeuse Jul 04 '17 at 23:31
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    @betelgeuse Some things are written and pronounced the same in Spanish and Italian too, and also, other northern Italian languages can be closer to the Spanish/Venetian examples you gave than the Italian ones. Anecdotal similarities are not phylogenetic evidence: Romance's isoglosses wigwag all over the place. Your examples involve: absence of long consonants in Venetian/Spanish, but it's Italian that's unusual in retaining them; /e/ failing to tense into /i/, also specific to Italian, not Romance in general; conditional suffix closer to Latin than to the one later adopted by Italian. – LjL Jul 05 '17 at 23:01
  • It's a great mistake to think that dialect is somehow corrupted Italian. Rather, there were separate dialects for a millennium and then lingua toscana in bocca romana was chosen by some mediaeval writers as the new unified standard. Neither pronunciation of 'c' is like the original Latin pronunciation anyway. – Adam Bittlingmayer Jul 07 '17 at 20:03
  • LjL and AMB - Thank you for the clarifications and perspective on Italian dialects – betelgeuse Jul 08 '17 at 04:01

4 Answers4

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In any place where regional origin is associated with lower social status (basically, where internal migration in search of jobs and wages is/was important, or where a central political authority was recently imposed into a periphery) we will find such phenomenon.

Some from Brazilian Portuguese:

"ti" pronounced /θi/ instead of /t͡ʃi/ (very much the same as in your example, btw, except that both pronouciations only exist before /i/) shows a Northeastern (more specifically, Recife-an) pronounciation; as there was intense migration from the drough-afflicted Northeast to more economically dynamical Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, which lead to a significant part of the working class in these cities being of Northeastern origin, and so to speak like this, it resulted in the pronounciation being stigmatised.

Non-stressed "e" pronounced as /ɛ/ instead of /e/, involving the same regions and "logic" as the previous;

Post-vocalic "r" pronounced as a retroflex is characteristic of the hinterland of São Paulo. As there is always migration from the countryside to the capital, and the rural areas have a low prestige, again this pronounciation is stigmatised.

Final "e" pronounced as /e/ instead of reduced to /i/ is similarly characteristic of rural Rio Grande do Sul, and as such stigmatised in a similar way (though in this case, due to the importance of the rural area in the identitary mythology of gaúchos, it gets more complicated, the pronounciation being derided by inhabitants of Porto Alegre when uttered by migrants from the countryside, but upheld as a source of pride against people of the centre of the country).

Luís Henrique
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In Hindi the usage of only /s/ in the place of /ʃ/ /ʂ/ and /s/ generally makes one sound less educated. Same with the realization of the monophthongs /ɛː/ and /ɔː/ as diphthongs /əɪ/ and /əʊ/. These are mostly found in rural areas that don't use standard Delhi Hindi (also called Khadi Boli), speaking e.g Haryanvi, Bhojpuri, Braj Bhasha etc.

Aryaman
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You'd be better off asking what languages don't have such a feature.

An example from New York City English is the curl-coil merger, which pronounces curl/coil, verse/voice, loin/learn as homophones. In all of these words, the vowel becomes [ɜɪ] (without rhoticity). While once characteristic of NYCE, this feature has been so stigmatized that it has nearly disappeared.

ubadub
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I imagine this happens to some extent in all languages with a prestige dialect and non-prestige dialects with distinctive realisations of phonemes. Some examples that come to mind:

iacobo
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