Italian Speech Varieties in the United States and the Italian-American Lingua Franca

Family interaction and engagement with the heritage language: A case study

“…Sociolinguistic investigations have confirmed the existence of a general pattern that characterizes the linguistic evolution of Italian Americans and that is applicable to Italian Americans who migrated as far as the 1940s and 1950s: one that presents first generation immigrants as dominant in their dialect or in Italian, 'second generation English Brought to you by | Georgetown University Authenticated Download Date | 5/27/15 9:10 PM dominant but with native control of Italian and third generation with only passive competence of Italian' (Del Torto 2008: 80). Indeed studies of language maintenance and shift (Correa Zoli 1980;Di Pietro 1986;Saltarelli 1986;Haller 1987) identified the presence of a number of different varieties among Italian Americans including standard Italian, dialects, English, and mixed varieties, but did conclude that language shift into English happened by the third generation. However, as I argue in this article, while the wide lenses of contact sociolinguistics are adequate instruments to provide a general picture of language varieties and repertoires spoken by Italians in the United States, the risk of focusing too narrowly on language maintenance and loss is that of looking at immigrant varieties exclusively in terms of deficit with respect to the language of origin.…”

“…The few existing linguistic studies (see Di Pietro 1986;Haller 1987;Milione & Gambino 2009) have mostly concentrated on the macroscopic phenomena of language loss and shift into English that characterize the linguistic history of Italian Americans, and that mirror the evolution of most immigrant groups of European origins in this country. Such analyses, based on sociolinguistic interviews and surveys, provide a general picture of the linguistic repertoires of Italian Americans and of the evolution and loss of their original tongues.…”

Performing new identities: the community language of post-crisis Italian migrants in London

“…Before going deeper into this analysis and argument, it is useful to explain briefly the Italian historical migratory linguistic scenario. In the past, the Italian migrants mainly presented a dialectal linguistic repertoire (Ciliberti, 2007;Guzzo, 2014;Haller, 1987;Rocchi, 2006;Rubino, 2014). In Italy, several dialects are spoken (every city or town has a different one).…”

Pidgins

“…However, the terms 'pidgin' or 'pidginisation' have been used for phenomena as diverse as English loans in languages such as German, Italian, Japanese, Russian and Spanish (Ardila 2005;Bergmann 2001;Haller 1987;Hensel 1999;Oshima 2002;Ustinova 2005: 243-4), English as such, due to its role as an international lingua franca (Aldea 1987), various foreign influences in written language (Duszak 2002: 16;Kann 1999), Anglophone schoolchildren's limited French (Hammerly 1987), first or second language immigrant varieties such as broken Swedish among immigrants in Stockholm, Greek as spoken in Australia, and the Spanish of Latin Americans in Sweden (Kotsinas 1996(Kotsinas , 2001Tamis 1990;Borgström 1991), majority influences on linguistic minorities, such as Min-influenced English in Malaysia, Englishinfluenced French in Maine and French-influenced varieties of Alsatian German (Birken-Silverman 1997;Ladin 1982: 77;Crevenant-Werner 1993: 185;Lee 1996;Schweda 1980), the speech of EU bureaucrats in Brussels (Dietze 1976) and even the use of first names by Australian businessmen in their contacts with Japanese colleagues (Marriott 1991). One possibility could be to accept everything as a pidgin that has been so labelled by one or more authors.…”