Vincenzo Nicolò Di Caro & Gianluca Lebani

ABSTRACT

We intend to investigate whether the language attitudes and uses of bilingual speakers(Italian + any Sicilian dialect, a case of dilalìa in Berruto’s terms [1]) while writing on Social Media (SM) are affected by the unbalanced use of the two varieties, given the fact that Italo-Romance dialects seldom have official written codes. We used an online questionnaire featuring a BLP [2, 3] and original questions on the bilingual speaker’s use of SM and their language attitudes towards the use of their dialects on SM. We administered the questionnaire to 71 participants (aged 18-67, M = 38.6, SD = 14.52) from 20 Sicilian cities, from September to December 2020. The preliminary results show that, on a sample with a slight dominance of Italian (M = 57.2 on a -218/+218 range), 60% of all interactions on 4 different SM per participant (M = 3.89, SD = 1.031) are via written texts, but only 10% of all interactions are in Sicilian. Although only 15.5% of participants declare they give up writing in Sicilian on SM because they are not sure of how to spell words correctly, 60.6% of them agree/strongly agree on the importance of sites which explain Sicilian grammar. Following Verdoodt’s [4] advice that research should always precede the drawing up of language policies, we aim at addressing the local institutions to promote the teaching of Sicilian grammar to provide bilingual SM users with a set of tools to preserve their bilingualism even in the context of written messages on SM.

Keywords

Bilingualism, Language Dominance, Social Media, Sicilian dialects, Language preservation

References

1. Berruto, G. (1987). Lingua, dialetto, diglossia, dilalìa. In Holtus, G. & Kramer, J. (Eds.), Romania et Slavia adriatica, Festschrift für Zarko Muljačić (pp. 57-81). Hamburg: Buske.

2. Birdsong, D., Gertken, L.M., & Amengual, M. (2012). Bilingual Language Profile: An Easyto-Use Instrument to Assess Bilingualism. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. Web. 20 Jan. 2012.

3. Gertken, L.M, Amengual, M. & Birdsong, D. (2014). Assessing Language Dominance with the Bilingual Language Profile. In P. Leclercq, A. Edmonds, & H. Hilton (Eds.), Measuring L2 Proficiency: Perspectives from SLA, 2014, 78, (pp. 208-225). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

4. Verdoodt, A. F. (2000). The Demography of Language. In F. Coulmas (Ed.), The Handbook of Sociolinguistics (pp. 33-45). Blackwell Publishers.