35.1316, Review: Studies in Italian as a Heritage Language: Romano (ed.) (2023)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-35-1316. Wed Apr 24 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.1316, Review: Studies in Italian as a Heritage Language: Romano (ed.) (2023)

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Date: 25-Apr-2024
From: Oliver Whitmore [whitmore.1 at berkeley.edu]
Subject: Applied Linguistics: Romano (ed.) (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.1401

EDITOR: Francesco Bryan Romano
TITLE: Studies in Italian as a Heritage Language
SERIES TITLE: LANGUAGE CONTACT AND BILINGUALISM
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Oliver Whitmore

SUMMARY

Studies in Italian as Heritage Language (SIHL), edited by Francesco
Bryan Romano, is the new volume in the Language Contact and
Bilingualism Series (edited by Yaron Matras). The primary goal of SIHL
is to present the language of Italian heritage speakers as just as
important for heritage linguistics and language acquisition studies as
heritage Spanish is. SIHL also aims to exhibit Italian language
bilingual contexts outside of North America. The volume, thus, seeks
to diversify and complement two fields which have generated much
thought in the United States: heritage language acquisition (of
Spanish) and Italian-American cultural studies.
The volume is divided into two parts: 1. Experimental studies
(Chapters 2-7) and 2. Observational Studies (Chapters 8-10), in
addition to an initial chapter by Silvina Montrul on the state of the
field (Chapter 1).

In Chapter 1, ‘Heritage language development: Dominant language
transfer and the sociopolitical context’, Silvina Montrul discusses
language features that have been at the center of heritage
linguistics, such as the acquisition of morphosyntactic gender, case,
word order, and the expression of null and overt subject pronouns.
Montrul takes a special interest in questioning the acquisitional
differences between heritage language (HL) speakers and second
language (L2) speakers and the role of majority language transfer. She
concludes by noting the difficulty in understanding disparate levels
of proficiency across different heritage speaker communities due to
the convergence of sociocultural factors and linguistic factors.

The first of the Experimental studies in the volume (Chapter 2) is
‘Ultimate attainment in long-immersed heritage Italian immigrants:
Syntactic and semantic knowledge of direct object clitics and
partitive ne’ by Pedro Guijarro Funetes, Iria Bello Viruega, Estela
García Alcaraz, and Sergio Viveros Guzmán. They study the attrition
effects that long-time exposure to Spanish has on speakers of heritage
Italian with respect to interpretable (semantic) and uninterpretable
(syntactic) features as expressed in object pronoun stimuli. Since the
results show that heritage speakers did not perform differently
compared to monolingual Spanish and Italian speakers, the study
suggests that “language attrition is neither feature-specific nor
language-specific” for languages within a single language family (p.
61).

Giuditta Smith, Roberta Spelorzi, Antonella Sorace, and Maria Garraffa
have contributed ‘Grammatical competence in adult heritage speakers of
Italian and adult immigrants: A comparative study’ as Chapter 3. They
use methods from psycholinguistics and clinical linguistics to compare
the proficiency levels of heritage speakers of Italian and English
with the levels of immigrants dominant in Italian and with knowledge
of English as an L2. Like other studies in the field, their results
suggest that heritage speakers use the same linguistic system as
immigrants despite the tendency of heritage speakers to use simpler
structures.

The volume editor, Francesco (Bryan) Romano has contributed Chapter 4,
‘Ultimate attainment of gender in heritage and L2 Italian’. He tests
two hypotheses from the field of second language acquisition with
heritage speakers, namely, the failed function feature hypothesis and
the missing surface inflection hypothesis. Romano interprets the
findings as incompatible with the failed function feature hypothesis,
suggesting that differences between heritage speakers and L2 speakers
are associated with task pressure and memory recall, and not onset age
of acquisition or shared language categories. This contribution
redirects the field of heritage language studies towards computational
theories, such as the missing surface inflection hypothesis.

Chapter 5, by Maria Teresa Bonfatti-Sabbioni, is entitled ‘Auxiliary
selection in heritage speakers of Italian’. The author engages with
the heritage language as an independent interlanguage, created by the
“receivers of the heritage input” (i.e. the children), using material
from the “input providers” (i.e. the parents) (p. 134). She uses the
family locus as the site of her study on auxiliary selection. She
finds that children generally perform in line with the input
providers, with exceptions predicted by the Auxiliary Selection
Hierarchy (Sorace, 2000). Bonfatti-Sabbioni’s research suggests that
ambiguous semantic categories can be subject to reorganization within
certain limits by the receiver of heritage input.

Jacopo Torregrossa, Irene Caloi, and Andrea Listanti have contributed
Chapter 6, ‘The acquisition of syntactic structures in heritage
Italian: Assessing the role of language exposure at critical periods’.
The researchers investigate a classic topic in child language
acquisition, namely, the correlation of speaker age, amount of
exposure, and attainment of simple and complex syntactic structures.
Their study among Italian-German bilingual children reaffirms
knowledge in the field that core syntactic structures, such as
complement clauses, are acquired early, while complex structures which
involve movement or embedding and movement, are acquired late (at
around 6 years of age). This is credited to the role of general
cognitive development as part of the language acquisition process:
“the structures that heritage children find more difficult are exactly
the ones that emerge late in monolingual language acquisition” (p.
186).

Chapter 7 finishes Part 1 of SIHL as the last of the experimental
studies and is called ‘The expression of (deontic and epistemic)
modality in Italian as heritage language in Germany’. In this chapter,
Katrin Schmitz and Tim Diaubalick use semi-structured interviews to
elicit structures of modality from adult Heritage Italian-German
speakers and monolingual Italian speakers. Even though the two
languages vastly differ in how they express modality though lexical
items, grammatical mood, and tense, they conclude that there is no
clear evidence of convergence of the German and Italian systems among
heritage speakers. Their project opens the field up for further
studies to understand why there is no convergence despite all
expectations.

Part 2 of SIHL comprises a small, diverse set of observational studies
that primarily rely on socially informed and qualitative methods of
analysis. Chapter 8 is called ‘Italian Heritage language in third
generations on social networks: Morphosyntactic code-switching
features’. In this paper, Caterina Ferrini explores the language use
of third-generation Italian immigrants to the US. Ferrini
characterizes their written language as an English matrix system with
embedded lexical items and collocations of Sicilian and Standard
Italian origin. Ferrini’s study implies that third-generation speakers
can manipulate residues of the HL morphology despite preference for
the majority language.

In Chapter 9, Elisa De Cristofaro and Linda Badan discuss ‘Discourse
markers in heritage Italian spoken in Flanders’. In this study, the
researchers aim to discover the lexical, syntactic, and functional
differences in discourse markers between Italian L1 speakers and HL
and L2 speakers of Italian living in Flanders (Belgium). The data
reveal that all three groups use discourse markers in the same
syntactic structure, but that L2 speakers prefer discourse markers
associated with written material and HL speakers tend to use markers
associated with oral discourse, reflecting the environment in which
the language was acquired. Combined with evidence of interference from
Dutch and French, the researchers advance a line of questioning for
discourse markers that resonates with Matras (2009) on a shared
linguistic repertoire for languages in contact.

The final chapter (Chapter 10), by Margherita Di Salvo & Eugenio
Goria, focuses on ‘Auxiliary selection in Italo-Romance heritage
languages: Argentina and the UK’. The authors employ an intense
sociolinguistic lens in their analysis of auxiliaries, accounting for
the language(s) of the homeland, the linguistic and socioeconomic
context of the destination countries, the language status of the
speakers (simultaneous/sequential bilinguals), and the relative
speaker generation. The researchers discover that different mechanisms
of language change have occurred in the two communities—one related to
majority language transfer and the other to mechanisms of internal
language change. This study reminds researchers that the linguistic
processes which affect the speech of heritage communities include more
than language acquisition alone.

EVALUATION

The various studies in SIHL are suited to the Language Contact &
Bilingualism series. SIHL takes on the challenge of expanding the
study of heritage language acquisition into Italian heritage
communities. Featuring both new and experienced scholars, the volume
provides a space for the diffusion of completed projects and projects
in progress. The volume accomplishes the goals set out in its
introduction: making it known that Italian heritage communities exist
outside of North America and providing insight on topics in language
acquisition.

Part 1 (Experimental Studies) of SIHL demonstrates that Italian
heritage communities are valid sites for understanding processes of
general heritage language acquisition (see also Montrul, 2016). The
contributions in this section reinforce and verify the status quo of
the field of heritage language acquisition. Sometimes heritage
speakers perform like L1 speakers (Chapters 3, 6, 7); sometimes they
perform like L2 speakers (Chapter 4); and sometimes their performance
occupies an in-between space (Chapter 5). Part 1 provides a solid
background for researchers to explore key concepts and upcoming
questions in heritage language acquisition studies.

The questions raised in Part 1 echo the sentiments in Montrul’s
introductory chapter: Why do heritage speakers in a community perform
differently from a community of a similar background somewhere
elsewhere in the world? Part 2 (Observational Studies) launches
innovative projects with speaker-centered approaches that aim at this
question through the lens of several Italo-Romance varieties
(including Standard Italian). The three papers in Part 2 come together
by providing slices of different generations throughout time from
immigrant language communities. These chapters bring excitement for
further research in this line of thought, emphasizing how an
individual’s acquisition affects, maintains, challenges, and diffuses
at the community level over time.

SIHL frequently discusses the effects of language contact at the
interface level of linguistic subfields. Apart from Chapter 10, there
is minimal discussion of the main socio-cultural interface of the
volume— what it actually means to be of ‘Italian’ heritage. This
largely ignores the bulk of research on Italian immigrant situations
in North America and the Italo-Romance language(s) that they use (e.g.
Carnevale, 2010; Prifti, 2017). Most of the individual studies in SIHL
omit a full descriptive profile of the ‘Italian’ language transmitted
from the immigrant generation to the heritage speakers. Even though
the use of Italo-Romance varieties in Italy has shifted towards
regionally-flavored varieties of Standard Italian (De Renzo, 2008;
Maiden, 1995; Maiden & Parry, 2006), some studies in SIHL (Chapters 2,
7) resort to post-hoc concessions to possible influence from other
Italo-Romance languages or Regional Italian to explain unexpected
outcomes in their studies.

Some studies (Chapters 8, 10) in the volume wisely consider
Italo-Romance influences from the outset. Indeed, Romano, in his
introduction, defends the inclusion of these Italo-Romance studies in
the volume as part of the history of the Italian peninsula. In doing
so, he recognizes the difficulty for the researcher to define
‘Italian’. Researchers in the heritage context might also carefully
consider the speaker-participant’s self-identification in their
discussion. Research in the United States has shown that speakers
often classify other Italo-Romance varieties as ‘(Standard) Italian’,
but that some speakers classify Standard Italian as ‘dialect’ (Serra,
2017). Clarifying the nature of ‘Italian’ in each chapter would ensure
the impact of the conclusions.

A related weakness in the volume is the inconsistent description of
heritage speakers. Many authors use positive or neutral terminology in
their discussion; however, a few studies continue to frame heritage
language acquisition with a deficit mindset, e.g. “missing skills”
(Chapter 8) and “correctness” (Chapter 3). Since terminology makes an
impact in the discussion of minority and minoritized language
communities (Bley-Vroman, 1983; Perley, 2012), the volume could
enforce a speaker-first approach without sacrificing a diversity of
content.

Overall, SIHL is a valuable tool for beginning and experienced
scholars of generative and cognitive approaches to language
acquisition. Scholars whose interests lie primarily in the social and
anthropological understanding of heritage languages or in Italian
culture will need to wait readily at the forefront if ever there
should be a subsequent volume to the present one.

REFERENCES

Bley‐Vroman, R. (1983). The comparative fallacy in interlanguage
studies: The case of systematicity. Language learning, 33(1), 1-17.

Carnevale, N. 2009. A new language, a new world: Italian Immigrants in
the United States 1890-1945. University of Illinois Press.

De Renzo, F. (2008). Per un'analisi della situazione sociolinguistica
dell'Italia contemporanea. Italiano, dialetti e altre lingue. Italica,
85(1), 44-62.

Maiden, M. (1995). A linguistic history of Italian. Routledge.

Maiden, M., & Parry, M. (Eds.). (2006). The dialects of Italy.
Routledge.

Matras, Y. (2009). Language Contact. Cambridge University Press.

Montrul, S. (2016). The Acquisition of Heritage Languages. Cambridge
University Press.

Perley, B. (2012). Zombie linguistics: Experts, endangered languages
and the curse of undead voices. Anthropological forum, 22(2), 133-149.

Prifti, E. (2017). Americanismi d’Italia, italianisme d’America: Cenni
sulle tracce lessicali della Grande Emigrazione. Testi e linguaggi,
11, 183-196.

Serra, R. (2017). Intrecci linguistici. Lingue e dialetti italiani tra
i giovani italoamericani nella grande area di New York. Forum
Italicum, 51(3), 727-760.

Sorace, A. (2000). Gradients in auxiliary selection with intransitive
verbs. Language, 76(4), 859-890.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Oliver Whitmore is a PhD candidate in the Romance Languages &
Literatures program at the University of California, Berkeley, where
he specializes in language revitalization & French and Occitan
linguistics. His dissertation seeks to implement a framework to study
dialectology among communities engaged in revitalization of
post-vernacular languages. He has recently taught courses in Romance
Linguistics, French Phonology & Dialectology, and Language
Revitalization. He also directs a reading group on Zoom, open to
anyone who is interested in Occitan language & culture.



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