Language attitudes among mobile speakers. Evidence from Italian speakers living abroad

Marzo, Stefania; Natale, Silvia; De Pascale, Stefano (2021). Language attitudes among mobile speakers. Evidence from Italian speakers living abroad. In: Ziegler, Arne; Edler, Stefanie; Oberdorfer, Georg (eds.) Urban matters. Current approaches in variationist sociolinguistics. Studies in Language Variation (pp. 119-140). Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Preview

Text Language_speakers__pages.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works (CC-BY-NC-ND). Download (439kB) | Preview

This paper explores the variability of belief systems that underpin standardization dynamics by investigating the effect of international mobility on attitudes of Italians towards standard and regional Italian. Research has shown that standard Italian is converging toward spoken or regional varieties, leading to the emergence of neo-standard Italian. While previous studies focused exclusively on Italians in Italy, we investigate how attitudes towards neo-standard Italian develop for Italians abroad. A matched-guise experiment carried out with Italian speakers living in Switzerland and Belgium is compared to an experiment carried out in Italy. Our results show a change in the social meaning of standardization among mobile communities, as Italians living abroad seem to neutralize the prestige that Italians in Italy attach to Milanese Italian and instead upgrade Neapolitan Italian, which had been downgraded by young Italians in the previous experiment.

Interest & Impact

Downloads

60 since deposited on 10 Feb 2022
48 in the past 12 months

Citations

5 Citations in Web of Science ®
6 Citations in Scopus

Search

in Google Scholar™

Services

Actions (login required)

Edit item

Actions (login required)

Edit item