The Language(s) of Italian Americans: Heritage and Evolution

The session explores three dimensions of the complexity of learning Italian by heritage students in the U.S. The first explores its language policy implications, the second its identity dimension, focusing on the identity negotiation of learners with multilingual backgrounds, and the third a strictly linguistic issue: the prosodic features of Italian spoken by bilingual Italians in the U.S.

The first presentation by Roberto Dolci, “Per un'analisi della vitalità dell'italiano nel mondo” [For an Analysis of the Vitality of the Italian Language in the World], examines both primary and secondary data to establish reference parameters to understand the vitality of the Italian language in contexts where it is both a foreign and a heritage language, with a focus on the U.S, presenting the results of applying a variant of the C.O.D. (Capacity, Opportunity, Desire) model developed by Grin (1990, 2003) and furthered by Grin and Vaillancourt (1998) and Lo Bianco (2008).

In the second talk titled “Identità in movimento: pluri-biografie digitali e riflessione metacognitiva di apprendenti di italiano L3/Ln” [Identity in Motion: Digital Multi-Biographies and Metacognitive Reflection of Learners of Italian L3/Ln], Barbara Spinelli explores how learners of Italian in a post-secondary setting navigate their multiple identities linked to their multilingual backgrounds and migration experiences, focusing on a case study of an Italian American student in relation to other learners with different migratory experiences.

In the third and last presentation, “L’italiano negli Stati Uniti: uno studio sul parlato bilingue e il contatto linguistico” [Italian in the U.S.: A Study of Bilingual Speech and Language Contact], Isabella Matticchio presents preliminary results from a prosodic study of Italian as spoken by individuals in the U.S. with varying levels of language competence. The study is based on a collection of audio recordings from a reading task of a short Aesop's fable. The results will shed new light on the Italian language abroad, while the compiled corpus of recordings may also serve for further studies in the fields of language teaching and bilingualism.