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In the description of the vocalic systems, it is sometimes necessary to account for unstable vowel qualities, most especially in cases where – either due to non-uniform geographical diffusion or to the degree of variability involved – this representation proves particularly difficult. Depending on the quality of the recordings and the skills of the transcriber, a vowel sound with unstable quality can be seen either as the realization of a diphthongized nucleus, or else as a sound which is strongly conditioned by the surrounding sounds or which is subject to intrinsic local instability. In some cases, these vowel realizations may be further distinguished because of the consonantal characteristics which one may find at their edges, whereas in other cases they are definitely reanalyzed as vowel clusters or diphthongs. In this paper, we try to offer some grounds for an instrumental processing of unstable vowel qualities by applying a paradigm which we already tested in previous studies and by proposing a new vowel breaking index. Original techniques of formant tracking have been applied to stressed vowels of a speech corpus from the Apulian dialect of Corato spoken in the Italian province of Bari. While this dialect has been investigated from a phonological point of view by other colleagues, the representations we propose here for its vocalic system (and for the conditions under which the sound change seems to have occurred) are quite different. In particular, we account for a type of polymorphism which results from a specific group of descending diphthongs which are known as “broken vowels” or frangimenti and may be easily observed in the common speech of this dialectal variety. In our discussion of the data selected we propose that (1) different breaking processes may give rise to shared allophones, and (2) some mergers suggest that there is a correlation between these breaking processes and certain specific patterns of prosodic organization.