Thread:EmigaRaptor/@comment-25653892-20150721204711/@comment-25653892-20150725023835

In Italian there is no phonemic distinction between long and short vowels, but vowels in stressed open syllables, unless word-final, are long. Adjacent identical vowels found at morpheme boundaries are not resyllabified, but pronounced separately ("quickly rearticulated"), and they might be reduced to a single short vowel in rapid speech.

Although Italian contrasts high-mid and low-mid  vowels in stressed syllables, this distinction is neutralised in unstressed position, where only the high-mid vowels occur. The height of these vowels in unstressed position is context-sensitive; they are somewhat lowered in the vicinity of more open vowels. The distinction between high- and low-mid vowels is lost entirely in a few Southern varieties, especially in the Northern Sicilian dialect (Palermo), where only low-mid vowels occur; similarly, some Northern varieties (in particular in Piedmont) only present a lowered realisation of high-mid vowels.

Word-final stressed is only found in loanwords. Word-final unstressed is rare. Major exceptions are onomatopoeic terms (babau); loanwords (guru); and place or family names of Sardinian origin (Gennargentu, Porcu).

When the last phoneme of a word is an unstressed vowel and the first phoneme of the following word is any vowel, the former vowel tends to become non-syllabic. This phenomenon is called synalepha and should be taken in account when counting syllables, e.g. in poetry.

In addition to monophthongs, Italian has diphthongs, but they're not phonemic. The grammatical tradition has classified them as falling diphthongs and rising diphthongs; however, since rising diphthongs are composed of one semiconsonantal sound or  and one vowel sound, they are not technically diphthongs, and this has led to criticism from phoneticians like Luciano Canepari.