General overview

HELLO CAMPANIA is a project about heritage languages (HL) in Campania, these are the languages spoken by immigrant communities. The project has three main objectives: (i) to provide the first sociolinguistic study on HLs in Campania in order to describe the forms of migration-induced multilingualism; (ii) to describe the multilingual language practices of migrants with respect to the choice of Italian, the local dialect and their HL in order to investigate how multilingual speakers strategically make use of linguistic resources, and how these practices relate to external linguistic variables (gender, level of education, ethnic origin, kind of social network, mother tongue, segregation index); (iii) to carry out the first qualitative and quantitative description of a HL in Italy, starting from one single case study, the one of Filipino in Campania to investigate contact-induced language changes.. This research intends to go beyond the current state of the art on HLs in Campania and in Italy in relation to three points: (i) understanding the practices of alternation among Italian/dialect/HL in four different HL communities (Ukraine, Sri Lanka, Filipino, Bangladesh) which differ with respect to their segregation index; (ii) verifying if and to what extend this index work as a sociolinguistic variable, encouraging/discouraging both the acquisition of Italian and HL intergenerational transmission. Finally, we intend to realize the first linguistic description of a HL in Italy, by systematically comparing 1st and 2nd generation Filipino speakers. The project will fill the current information gap on immigrant languages in Campania, adopting an innovative bottom-up approach that is based on different subfield of linguistic research (namely sociolinguistic, language acquisition and language contact).

Grant: PRIN PNRR 2022

Project number: P2022WJ8YF

Staff: Dr. Francesca Moro (PI), prof. Antonia Soriente and Dr. Marta Maffia (Project Components) University of Naples L’Orientale; prof. Margherita di Salvo (associated PI) University of Naples Federico II, Dr. Violetta Cataldo (Project Component).

Research Units: University of Naples L’Orientale, University of Naples Federico II

Scientific Board: Barbara Turchetta (University of Bergamo), Ada Valentini (University of  Bergamo), Eugenio Goria (University of Turin), Suzanne Aalberse (University of Amsterdam), Franca Orletti (University of  Roma Tre), Gerardo Mazzaferro (University of Turin)

ERC Panel: SH_4

Starting date: 30/11/2023

End date: 30/11/2025

Budget: € 262.000,00