Ci Arrangiamo:Negotiating Linguistic Shift-Maintenance in an Italian- Canadian Community.

Language Contact;Sociolinguistics;Shift and Maintenance;Family Interaction;Language and Identity;Linguistics;Humanities;Social Sciences;Linguistics

Del Torto, Lisa M.Thomason, Sarah G. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Language Contact;    Sociolinguistics;    Shift and Maintenance;    Family Interaction;    Language and Identity;    Linguistics;    Humanities;    Social Sciences;    Linguistics;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/61600/ldeltor_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation investigates the complexities of language shift and maintenance among four generations of Italian Canadians by examining what participants say about language and what they do with language in family interactions. Analyses of multigenerational family conversations, informal interviews, and ethnographic observation focus on the sociolinguistic means through which participants create and negotiate simultaneous pressures to shift to English monolingualism and to maintain the Italian language and notions of Italianness. Italianness is an important aspect-of-self for participants, and they (re)create it through linguistic means that do not fall under traditional notions of maintenance. An examination of what participants say about language shows that they feel that younger generations are losing the Italian language. Third-generation participants claim that they have full receptive knowledge of Italian and more productive knowledge than they often use, but that social norms for the use of Italian and English in family conversations dictate that they use only English, with the exception of occasional Italian emblematic expressions. At the same time that participants feel pressure to use only English, they want to maintain Italianness and Italian language. The examination of what participants do with language focuses on three linguistic phenomena recurrent in family interaction: interpreting, Stylized Italian English, and insertion of Italian lexical items into otherwise English utterances. These phenomena are explored as (socio)linguistic practices and resources that respond to and (re)create simultaneous pressures for language shift and maintenance and reinforce notions of Italianness. Little work has been done in sociolinguistics and language contact studies to explore the ways in which shift and maintenance are intertwined and co-occurring processes within a dynamic shift-maintenance system. Sociolinguistics has largely ignored the ways in which participants create and negotiate simultaneous pressures for shift to monolingualism in the majority language and maintenance of the heritage language. This dissertation troubles definitions of maintenance by examining some of the realities that multiple generations of an immigrant community are experiencing from an on-the-ground ethnographic perspective. Studying these participants at this time provides a real-time model of a language shift-maintenance system and the practical realities of a North American language contact situation.