A comparative study of emotive language in English and Italian migrant narratives

Language conveys a lot about people; through language individuals give meaning to what they experience by defining themselves in relation to the world. Hence, language is inextricably linked with other components of human existence, such as moral and social structures. Placed in the tradition that considers language, emotions and social practices as deeply connected (Lutz, Abu-Lughod, 2005), this paper attempts to investigate the emotive language used by migrants in their digital narratives in order to establish empathy within the community for inclusion purposes. While the pivotal function of emotion in language contact settings is “underestimated both by sociolinguists and social psychologists” (Sevinc, 2020), this paper argues that a better understanding of emotive language (i.e. anxiety, nostalgia) and its role in migrant contexts can be the key to disentangling the connection between emotions, migration and culture. Following this aim, this work contributes to research on intercultural communication by exploring the impact of expressions of emotions on the community. Through quantitative and qualitative approaches, the work explores the role of emotive words within autobiographical linguistic representation. As such, the focus additionally seeks to redirect the narrative voice away from mainstream media and, in particular, to provide opposition to public social media platforms, which are “dominated by a resoundingly anti-migration stance” (Bakamo Public, 2018: 5). In its aim of repositioning perspective, this approach fits into the recent framework for ethnographic narrative analysis, which foregrounds storytelling, and enables “the study of processes of uprooting, relocation, adaptation to new surroundings and linguistic realities, and the consequent identity struggles of migrants and transnational individuals” (Baynham and De Fina, 2016: 31). The data for the analysis come from a corpus of English and Italian digital narratives published by museums. Final outcomes will be discussed for practices of language mediation and translation.