Variazione e immigrazione in Italia: prospettive di ricerca

In this paper a few research perspectives on language variation in immigrant context are tentatively envisaged and discussed, with a special focus on Italy. A recent model, which compares some of the linguistic and sociolinguistic features displayed by the language varieties potentially emerging in an immigrant context (Muysken, 2010), is taken as the point of departure for a discussion of the properties which may distinguish learners’ varieties of Italian from other contact varieties, such as ethnolects (i.e. varieties of Italian spoken by specific and recognizable ethnic groups) or Italian lexifier pidgins. The necessity of a thorough analysis of the structural outcomes of the contact on the immigrant languages spoken in Italy is also briefly pointed out. It is argued that the research on language variation and contact in Italy as a migration setting would benefit from the adoption of a multidimensional approach, which considers the communicative resources potentially emerging in multilingual settings to be the product of the combination of a set of both linguistic and sociolinguistic features, occurring with different degrees and patterns in each phenomenon actually attested.