Abstract
In present-day Italy, there are huge differences in the way immigrants adapt to the Italo-Romance varieties spoken in the receiving communities. Attitudes range from almost complete accommodation of the whole repertoire—i.e. from (Regional) Italian to the local dialect—to an outright rejection of the Italo-Romance dialect(s) spoken by the autochthonous population. The present chapter focuses on Ghanaian immigrants. The analysis of excerpts from a sample of face-to-face interactions and semi-structured interviews involving a group of first-generation Ghanaian immigrants, combined with the author’s long-term participant observation in the Bergamo community, will reveal that the interplay of three main factors—i.e. lack of input, negative attitudes and lack of motivation—feed into a self-reinforcing dynamic, which makes the incorporation of Italo-Romance dialects into the linguistic repertoire of first-generation Ghanaian immigrants unlikely.
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Notes
- 1.
ECOWAS is the acronym for Economic Community of West African States, a free trade regional alliance established in 1974, that includes Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, Niger, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo (cf. http://www.ecowas.int. Accessed 20 Sept. 2020).
- 2.
The term overloaded (Italian sovraccarico) is used by Berruto (2018: 511) to describe the complex linguistic repertoires which include more than two varieties in both the high and the low levels.
- 3.
See https://www.ethnologue.com/country/GH (Accessed 20 Sept. 2020).
- 4.
The theoretical framework adopted in this work is based on the conversation-analytic approach to the study of bilingual interaction elaborated by Peter Auer in 1984 and then revised through the publication of a number of subsequent works (Auer 1988, 1998 and ff.). Within this framework, code-switching is by definition a functional language-alternation strategy: the adjective “functional” implies that code-switching is always related to a change of communicative intention or a change of topic, addressee, footing, discursive function, and so forth. As a consequence, we may say that code-switching is always locally meaningful, whereas any switching to which no local meaning or function can be attributed is considered to be an instance of language mixing.
- 5.
On immigrants’ limited literacy skills and competences, see also Fusco (2017: 164ff.), whose study focused on the Friuli region.
- 6.
This sampling made a comparison between the first and the (incipient) second generation possible.
- 7.
The choice was motivated by the fact that the participant considered her competence in Akan inadequate to carry out the task.
- 8.
A participant said this to her map task partner, who feared the assignment was too difficult for him. Note that in extracts (11) and (12) the Italian verb root insegnare has the double meaning of ‘teach’ and ‘show’ also found in the Akan verb root kyerɛ.
- 9.
Such awareness is favoured by the fact that the structural distance between Italian and Bergamasco is greater than that existing between Romance languages, such as Italian and Spanish or Italian and Portuguese (e.g. Berruto 2018: 496–497).
- 10.
- 11.
I.e. forms of dialect resurgences, to borrow the words of Gaetano Berruto (2006).
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Guerini, F. (2022). Ghanaian Immigrants and the Twofold Potential of Italo-Romance Dialects. In: Goglia, F., Wolny, M. (eds) Italo-Romance Dialects in the Linguistic Repertoires of Immigrants in Italy. Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99368-9_6
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