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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 614

Part of General Poster Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Language maintenance across generations. A lexical-statistical approach to the Italian language performance of Venetian communities in Canada.

Authors: Bortolato, Claudia
Submitted by: Bortolato, Claudia (University of Exeter, United Kingdom)

The phenomenon of emigration is a significant chapter of Italian history, which has involved some 27 million people for about a century since Unification in 1861.

Particularly during the twenty years after the Second World War, this phenomenon evolved, turning into mass emigration from Italy. Canada, which had been in previous decades only marginally touched, became an important destination for Italian migrants during those years. Until 1967 Canada welcomed immigrants through the programme of sponsorship. New policies were adopted that year, closing the borders to the mass of manual workers entering the country in favour of numerically more limited immigration involving workers of higher skills and educational levels.

Nowadays people of Italian origin are about one and a half million in Canada, mostly residing in the metropolitan areas of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Among these, about 300.000 are those who actually emigrated from Italy. People with at least one parent born in Italy, however, are 712.420.

The specific historical moment allows fieldwork which includes three generations.  According to the well known model devised by Gonzo and Saltarelli (1983), the third generation is usually the last speaking the language of their grandparents, bringing to an end the cycle of a heritage language in a foreign language country.

The great majority of studies carried out so far on Italian communities abroad have focused on qualitative aspects of language maintenance (e.g. Bettoni and Rubino, 1996), forecasting the disappearance of heritage languages among Italian communities (e.g. Vedovelli 2011). This piece of research aims instead at approaching language maintenance from a quantitative perspective, analysing the Italian performance of those Italians of Venetian origin who can still speak this language.

The data presented are the results of the lexical-statistical treatment of 42 interviews carried out among Italo-Canadians of Venetian origin in the metropolitan areas of Toronto and Vancouver during the summer of 2009. In order to make the sampling more homogeneous, and thus allow statistical comparisons, the informants were selected only from those who emigrated during the mass emigration years in Canada (1945-1967) and their descendants of the second and third generation (according to the classification proposed by Bettoni 1986). The second independent variable taken into account is gender. The aim is thus to investigate if and how language maintenance could develop in a different way between these two categories.

 

Bibliography

Bettoni, C. (1986) Italian language attrition in Sydney: the role of birth order. In C. Bettoni (ed.), Altro Polo. Italian Abroad: Studies on Language Contact in English-speaking Countries. Sydney: May Foundation (University of Sydney), pp. 61-85

Cortelazzo M. and Tuzzi A. (2008) Metodi statistici applicati all’Italiano. Bologna: Zanichelli,.

Gonzo and Saltarelli (1983) Pidginization and linguistic change in emigrant languages. In R. Andersen (ed.), Pidginization and Creolization as Language Acquisition. Rowley: Newbury House.

Tuzzi, A. (2003) L’analisi del contenuto. Roma: Carocci.

Vedovelli. M. (2011) Storia linguistica dell’emigrazione italiana nel mondo. Roma: Carocci, pp.413-428