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Language contact phenomena in an Italian community in the UK

Guest speaker Valentina Del Vecchio (G. d’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara, Pescara, Italy) discusses language contact and code switching in an Italian community in the UK.

Migration is a phenomenon that has a crucial impact on the linguistic repertoires of the people involved. It usually brings about the emergence of different language contact phenomena due to the contact between a community’s heritage language and the language spoken in the host country. Among these, in the last few years, special attention has been paid to code-switching (CS), which, as a general term, refers to the common practice in bilingual communities of using two or more languages in the same conversation. This talk aims at analysing the impact that a specific migration context – that of an Italian community in the UK – has on the patterns of CS found in conversations among speakers of different generations of migrants.

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