PRIN PNRR (P2022YXE8Y)

DESCRIZIONE DEL PROGETTO

Since the 1960s, in the linguistic and social fields the interest in the study of communities of Italian origin abroad have progressively developed. From a sociological point of view, the ties of these communities with the country of the ancestors have been in some cases investigated, as well as the restructuring of identity relations into the host society. On the sociolinguistic side, the preservation and intergenerational transmission of the migrant language have been investigated, starting from Fishman’s studies, up to the recent definition of a specific migrational linguistics (Krefeld 2004). Despite De Mauro (1963) in dealing with Italian emigration had already emphasised the weight of dialectophony and the importance of regional identity feelings, there is a lack of wide-ranging studies on regional identities and minority languages among the Italian communities abroad. The project therefore focuses on the linguistic, cultural and social space of some communities which maintained to some extent identity and linguistic ties with their places of origin and descended from emigrant of Venetian, Campanian, Friulian and Tuscan origin, without neglected some smaller realities such as that of Franco-Provençal emigrants of Faeto (FG). The objectives are manifold and can be distributed on two levels:

a) macro- and micro-sociolinguistics

1. Assessing the degree sociolinguistic vitality of the emigrant group’s code, in the light of acculturation theories (cf. Bourhis, 2001), trying to connect it with the different meaningful parameters identified in sociological and sociolinguistic literature (cf. Fishman 1964, Giles et. al. 1977, Pugliese 2018, Ambrosini 2020).

2. Through oral and written texts produced by the informants or by members of the community,analysing the internal vitality and the contact induced language change (CILC) the emigrant languages have undergone due to the long-term coexistence in the multilingual community’s repertoire.

b) sociological

Collecting a number of family migration histories, through in-depht open interviews (Tusini 2022), with key informants, with the aim of reconstructing their social networks (Marotta 2021), their degree of socio-economic, educational and cultural inclusion into the host community, their identity-attitudinal stance towards personal migratory history as well as towards previous immigrant generations biographies, their socio-cultural ties with the community of origin. 

The final objectives of this project are the study of the external and internal vitality of the emigrant languages, of the relationship between sociolinguistic vitality and extralinguistic characteristics of each community. Moreover the project will contribute to the re-establishment of links between these communities and the corresponding ones in Italy, through the creation of an open access digital Archive, which could be a treasure chest of the historical, linguistic and sociological documentation of the minority communities.

UNITA' COINVOLTE

Unità di Udine: F. Zuin (P.I.), R. Bombi (membro unità), D. Sidraschi (Assegnista);

Unità di Chieti-Pescara: C. Perta (R.U.), V. Del Vecchio (Assegnista);

Unità di Perugia: M. Dentale (R.U.), S. Tusini (membro unità), S. Scaglione (membro unità)