Age-related Variation in Code-switching between Italian and the Sicilian Dialect

Abstract

The paper deals with intergenerational variation in syntactic and functional patterns of code-switching (CS) between Italian and the Sicilian dialect. The research is based on two kinds of data: (i) a corpus of spontaneous spoken language, recorded, transcribed and then submitted to conversation analysis (Alfonzetti, 1992; 2012); (ii) a written corpus of e-mails, text messages, posts in social networks, etc. The main purpose is to show that the occurrence of a particular switching strategy largely depends on sociolinguistic factors interacting with age (language proficiency; sociosymbolic values and communicative functions of the two languages; speakers' attitudes, etc.). This issue is extremely important both from a sociolinguistic perspective (age-related differences in CS are a key to understanding an ongoing language shift) and from a theoretical one (comparing CS patterns between the same two languages within the same community but across different age-groups helps to establish the relative role of sociolinguistic vs syntactic factors underlying CS).

Style and addressees interlocutor in the selection of dialectal vs. standard phonetic forms: Sicilian rhotics

“…Although more substantive evidence should be collected in order to confirm this apparent trend, it is nevertheless possible to anticipate that our findings are not consistent with the view that primary dialects are residual varieties in the contemporary Italian sociolinguistic landscape; rather, our findings point to the possibility that dialectal linguistic usages are agentive (Coupland, 2001) and actively exploited by the speakers for communicative, indexical, pragmatic or social purposes (e.g. Alfonzetti, 2014).…”

“…In this study we have analysed rhotic production by a young bilingual Italian-Sicilian speaker and two of his interlocutors during sentence reading tasks and map-task dialogues. We have proposed a methodological approach for the investigation of speech variation which capitalizes on the view that, as recently proposed (Berruto, 1987;Cerruti & Regis, 1995;Bellman, 1998;Auer, 2005;Kristiansen & Coupland, 2011;Alfonzetti, 2014), the linguistic repertoire of young dialectal speakers is a continuum of varieties whose different configuration is mostly predicted by the communicative situation and the pragmatic, stylistic and socio-indexical use of features originally devoted to geographic differentiation. Therefore, in the approach proposed here, varieties of Italian and of Sicilian dialect were elicited to reproduce an image, albeit fragmentary and incomplete, of the complexity of the linguistic repertoire of young Sicilian dialectal speakers, where the boundaries between the vernacular and the supra-regional language may themselves be elusive.…”

“…An additional character of the standard/dialect dynamics in Sicilian territories, that is worth recalling here, is that the dialect loses ground as language of primary socialization, but at the same time, most of the youngest speakers start to use the dialect as an L2, particularly within the peer group (Alfonzetti, 2014(Alfonzetti, , 2017Scaglione, 2016). Many authors suggest that the relationship between young speakers and the dialect is ambiguous.…”

Bilingualism and Cultural Identity: Exploring Teacher and Students’ Use of Code-Switching in Cultural Expressions

“…Studies on code-switching have been extensive since the past forty years. Bilingual interaction has been studied in Spanish-English (Poplack, 1979); Italian and a dialect in Sicily, Italy (Alfonzetti, 1998); Russian-English (Angermeyer, 2005); French-Italian (Aslanov, 2000); Japanese-English (Azuma, 1997); Turkish-Dutch (Backus, 1992); Arabic-English (Bader and Minnis, 2000); French-English (Heller, 1992); Chinese-English (Li et al, 2000); and African dialects (Myers-Scotton, 1993) among others. Even though code-switching analyses in these particular languages have been done by researchers worldwide, several investigations have left the meaning it possesses in conversation behind.…”

L’effet de la séquentialité dans le parler bilingue Algérien : Quelques procédés conversationnels productifs dans les codes mixtes

“…Il s'agit d'une composante largement indépendante qui est l'analyse conversationnelle. Elle considère l'AC comme stratégie de conceptualisation dont la fonction principale est de créer un contraste exploité par les locuteurs bilingues afin de marquer un changement de footing 1 , et plus particulièrement accomplir diverses tâches conversationnelles, contribuant à l'interprétation pragmatique des discours mixtes en contexte. Dans cette optique, l'AC se révèle pertinente non pas en corrélation avec les valeurs symboliques et sociales assignées aux codes investis dans le Code-Switching, mais surtout en fonction des relations étroites entre les différentes séquences de la conversation.…”