Francesco Goglia – författare

Italy is known for its history of emigration, with millions leaving its borders to find new beginnings elsewhere. They take with them their languages (including Italian) and establish themselves mostly in urban settings (i.e., cities). At the same time, the Italian language is widely studied outside of Italy owing to its prestige and historical links. Indeed, Italian is used every day around the world in the domains of food, fashion and design. This volume provides an overview of Italian in and beyond Italian migrant communities in a range of urban settings around the world. It brings together researchers working on Italian from a sociolinguistic perspective and/or on language maintenance and use of Italian in Italian immigrant communities worldwide. The number of Italians emigrating has risen again in the last decade, with Italians joining established communities (e.g. in Melbourne and New York) or forming new communities (e.g. in Barcelona). While all of these locations are being explored in the current volume, it also includes the discussion of lesser-known Italian language communities, some of which no longer exist (e.g. Italian(s) in Asmara and Mogadishu).

This edited book brings together experts on the sociolinguistics of immigration with a focus on the Italo-Romance dialects. Sociolinguistic research on immigrant communities in Italy has widely studied the acquisition and use of Italian as L2 by first-generation immigrants, the maintenance of immigrant languages and code-switching between Italian and the immigrant languages. However, these studies have mostly ignored or neglected to investigate immigrant speakers’ use of Italo-Romance dialects, their awareness of the sociolinguistic situation of majority and minority languages, and their attitudes towards them. Given the important role of Italo-Romance dialects in everyday communication and as a marker of regional identity, this book aims to fill this gap and understand more about the role that these languages play in the linguistic repertoire of immigrants. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociolinguistics, minority languages, multilingualism, migration, and social anthropology.