Performing new identities: the community language of post-crisis Italian migrants in London

Abstract

After the 2008 global crisis, Italy has experienced a relevant resumption of emigration. Tens of thousands of young Italians have chosen London as their favourite destination, giving birth to a new Italian community in the city. This article focuses on the transformation of migrants' national identity and on a distinctive device of identity expression: language. Sample cases, excerpted by a dataset collected for an original project, are used to explain how the insertion of English elements in the native language becomes expression of the loss of pure national identity and of the renegotiation of transnational and migratory identities.

Italian-Bangladeshis in London: Onward Migration and Its Effects on Their Linguistic Repertoire

“…The study of this new Italian migration wave from a sociolinguistic perspective is even more recent, and very limited research has been conducted so far (Cacciatore and Pepe 2018;Di Salvo and Vecchia 2019;Pepe 2021).…”

Navigating the London-French Transnational Space: The Losses and Gains of Language as Embodied and Embedded Symbolic Capital

“…Robert illustrates the in-group community-building function of London-French translanguaging, underlining the situated 'common-unity' of spoken practices (Cox 2005;Li 2011Li , 2018Wenger 1998Wenger , 2004Cacciatore and Pepe 2019) and their contribution to a shared London-French linguistic habitus. He relates how: we can quite easily begin in French and end in English, or come out with an English expression that we'll all understand because it doesn't really translate into French, or because it sums up either the sentiment or the remark.…”

“…On a subconscious level, the symbolic loss incurred through the (mis)interpretation of the translanguaging as a deliberate articulation of newfound superiority could be a corollary of the resentment felt by those left behind, some of whom suffered their loved-ones' departures as 'hidden injuries' (Lehmann 2013, p. 9). For them, the migratory act is not only conceived as a personal rejection, for example a desire to sever, or at least distance, filial ties, but equally a form of symbolic differentiation, the London-French's geographical mobility functioning as perceived social mobility, or 'snobbishness', through their exposure to, and embodiment of, 'strange'-and potentially superior-practices (Koven 2013;Cacciatore and Pepe 2019). In a dynamic symbolic process, my research participants' decision to migrate, to reject the habitat of origin, has caused a shift in their cultural and linguistic capital, transforming their dispositions and in turn subverting their originary habitus.…”

“…This conversion of symbolic capital gain to symbolic capital loss translates into othering and exclusion from previously strong affective bonds. Finally, I ask whether the translanguaging practices of the London-French diaspora transcend the notion of the 'cleft habitus' (Bourdieu 2004;Thatcher and Halvorsrud 2016), or even that of hybridity (Li 2018) or the hybrid habitus (Decoteau 2013;Pulley and Whaley 2020), by gesturing towards a post-structural conception of language as a borderless phenomenon (Otheguy et al 2015) that disrupts national, lexical and disciplinary divides (Cacciatore and Pepe 2019;Seloni 2019). Or is it an ideal borne of a transnational epistemology at odds with the ontological vécu of the migrants themselves?…”