32.2760, Diss: Italian; Spanish; Sociolinguistics : Joëlle Carota: ''The Italo-Venezuelan Community of Pescara (Italy): A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Spanish in Contact with Italian''

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-2760. Fri Aug 27 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.2760, Diss:  Italian; Spanish; Sociolinguistics : Joëlle Carota: ''The Italo-Venezuelan Community of Pescara (Italy): A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Spanish in Contact with Italian''

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Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2021 00:18:03
From: Joëlle Carota [jcarota at binghamton.edu]
Subject: The Italo-Venezuelan Community of Pescara (Italy): A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Spanish in Contact with Italian

 
Institution: University at Buffalo 
Program: Department of Romance Languages and Literatures 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2021 

Author: Joëlle Carota

Dissertation Title: The Italo-Venezuelan Community of Pescara (Italy): A
Sociolinguistic Analysis of Spanish in Contact with Italian 

Linguistic Field(s): Sociolinguistics

Subject Language(s): Italian (ita)
                     Spanish (spa)


Dissertation Director(s):
Wolfgang Wölck
Sara Piccioni

Dissertation Abstract:

The Italo-Venezuelan community of Pescara (Italy) is composed of multilingual
speakers of Italian ancestry who have resettled in Pescara as part of a
relatively recent return migration from Venezuela to Italy. Italo-Venezuelans
possess varying degrees of written and oral language proficiency in Spanish,
Italian and, to a lesser extent, in Abruzzese. 

This dissertation investigates language contact occurring between Spanish,
Italian, and Abruzzese and the linguistic and social consequences it produces.
The three primary objectives of this study are: investigating Spanish language
maintenance and language shift within the community, describing how daily
language choices influence Italo-Venezuelans’ identity formation processes,
and analyzing the linguistic results of language contact within
Italo-Venezuelans’ linguistic repertoires. Two secondary objectives are: the
elaboration of a Community Profile and the description of language attitudes.
This study integrates sociolinguistic and anthropological methods, including
the ethnographic sampling method known as Community Profile and the
qualitative analysis of natural speech data collected by sociolinguistic
interviews of Italo-Venezuelan speakers in Pescara. 

The results of this dissertation suggest that Spanish language maintenance in
Italy is a multi-layered process influenced by many factors, including the
language in which mainstream free education is conducted, economic stability
requiring mastery of Italian, political engagement, linguistic accommodation
of non-Italian speakers, minority language status in the host country and
language attitudes, minority language use in the media, intergenerational
continuity, and the existence of venues dedicated to language practice and
maintenance. The present study also finds that Italo-Venezuelans’ individual
and collective national identities range at varying degrees across a continuum
extending from Italian to Venezuelan and is significantly influenced by the
length of their stay in Italy. In order to signal their perceived identity to
their interlocutors, speakers use deictic elements and expressions indicating
associative meaning in their speech to which they attach positive or negative
connotations. Regarding language contact, the speech of Italo-Venezuelans can
be described as a contact variety, which is also an interlanguage,
characterized by transfer phenomena on all linguistic levels. The transfer
phenomena are mainly from Spanish into Italian but, in some instances, also
from Abruzzese into Italian and Spanish, and from Italian into Spanish. The
community profile is used as a sampling technique, but its results are also
used to determine the community’s social characteristics in order to better
analyze Italo-Venezuelans’ patterns of language use. Negative language
attitudes towards Latin American Spanish appear to decrease the likelihood of
Spanish language use and to negatively affect the overall improvement of
Spanish language proficiency.




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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-2760	
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