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Notes on the Mother Tongue ideology: Evidence from multilingual environments
... Thus, while she is affectively attached to these language practices, and seems to accrue value to them within specific leisurely spaces, she is not projecting a role for them in the future. This, in turn, might link to the fact that it is not such language practices but 'pure' monolingual ones that are clearly assignable to one of the two named languages that are socially valued (Dal Negro, 2011;Heller, 2006). ...
... In some cases, this considerably simplifies their actual language practices: for instance, both Aria and Alessio call Italian their mother tongue, even though Aria states that she mostly speaks Sicilian at home, and Alessio states that for most of his life he spoke a Southern Italian dialect before moving to South Tyrol three years prior to our interview. This kind of linguistic variation does not trouble their positionings as native speakers, as such patterns are quite common in the Italian context, but their cases underline how what gets assigned mother tongue status more likely is the standard language than nonstandard varieties or named dialects (Dal Negro, 2011). ...
... Another feature of Kramsch's (1997) native speaker is an assumption of monolingualism. This aspect has also been pointed out by other authors (Dal Negro, 2011;Horner & Weber, 2018;Rampton, 1990), but this assumption does not seem to hold for all cases: for instance, König anything that might potentially be of relevance. After a longer pause, Thomas self-selects one element as particularly relevant: he narrates that he grew up bilingual (004), specifying in elliptical manner that he grew up with Italian on his father's and German on his mother's side (005). ...
This thesis has adopted a subject-centred approach (Busch, 2015, 2017, 2020) in order to examine how adolescents in South Tyrol construct their linguistic repertoires and position themselves as speakers, and to investigate how such positionings relate to ideologies of language. It aimed to produce a situated account of how language ideologies affect speakers’ linguistic repertoires. The South Tyrolean context lends itself to such an investigation, as issues around language are highly salient there (Alber, 2012). I have drawn on language-biographical interviews with twenty-four adolescents in South Tyrol that I conducted around language portraits as visualisations of their linguistic repertoires. I considered interviews as co-constructed interactions. Alongside concepts of positioning (Bamberg, 1997; Davies & Harré, 1990; Spitzmüller, 2013), I drew on the analytical toolkits developed within different approaches to interactional analyses and included embodied aspects into analysis. I found that my interview partners’ accounts of their linguistic repertoires grouped into three major themes: they involved descriptions of language practices, positionings in terms of competence and positionings in affective terms. With regard to language practices, I showed that my interview partners largely described these by either assigning one named language or dialect to a specific social space, or by describing them as orderly alternations between a set of named languages and/or dialects. I showed how positionings in terms of competence were at times informed by the ideological figure of the native speaker. I also demonstrated that language ideologies construct the competent speaker as one who speaks a normatively correct, ‘pure’ language effortlessly and can successfully communicate across the widest possible spectrum of encounters. In terms of affective positionings, I found that my interview partners took stances of affective attachment, of desire, of enjoyment, of indifference and of dislike towards specific named languages or dialects, and that they narrated instances of lived experience of language in which they position themselves as ashamed, anxious, proud, regretful, pained, angry or frustrated, which in turn was informed by language ideologies.
... Spesso solo determinati tipi di bilinguismo, ovvero quello italiano/tedesco o italiano/inglese, sono infatti considerati come legittimi, mentre competenze in altri codici non sono altrettanto valorizzate nel mercato linguistico locale neanche dagli stessi cittadini stranieri che li parlano (cfr. Dal Negro 2011: 193 e LINEE 2010. ...
... il principio di conciliare analisi micro e macro, illustrato ai § III.2 e V.2). Inoltre, i risultati sono messi in relazione con categorie linguistico-identitarie, identificate come localmente significative in altre ricerche condotte in contesto altoatesino (cfr., per esempio, Veronesi 2008a, Dal Negro 2011, Franceschini 2011, Medda-Windischer 2011, Wisthaler 2011 e il § II del presente volume). L'ipotesi è che tale accostamento consenta di individuare le identità linguistiche più salienti nella strutturazione della propria biografia linguistica da parte delle tre partecipanti. ...
Oggetto del volume sono le biografie linguistiche di persone trasferitesi in Alto Adige (Südtirol) dai paesi successori alla Jugoslavia dal 1985 al 2015. Esaminando a livello contenutistico e formale i discorsi epilinguistici di parlanti che hanno vissuto e vivono in spazi sociolinguistici altamente complessi, la ricerca si propone di contribuire allo studio della ristrutturazione dei repertori in situazioni di contatto. Due sono le unità di analisi specifiche, identificate tramite i metodi della sociolinguistica interpretativa. Da un lato, si analizzano i glottonimi e le appo-sizioni usate per riferirsi alle varietà linguistiche d'origine. Ne emerge un quadro dei modi di posizionarsi dei partecipanti nei confronti dei recenti interventi di pianificazione linguistica in area balcanica. Dall'altro, si ricostruiscono gli spazi comunica-tivi narrati di tre intervistate attraverso l'esame delle loro storie di dialoghi. Questi racconti mostrano come le narratrici, attin-gendo a schemi interpretativi circolanti nella società altoatesina o resistendo loro, diano un senso vis-à-vis con la ricercatrice al cristallizzarsi di nessi più o meno inamovibili tra codici, luoghi e interlocutori nella regione d'arrivo.
... Wenn es im alltagssprachlichen Gebrauch anscheinend relativ einfach zu definieren ist, was mit einer Gruppe (z.B. einer Nationalgruppe) gemeint 4 | Über den Mythos von Muttersprache und Muttersprachlern und seine wissenschaftlichen und politischen Folgen siehe z.B. Ricento (2002) und Pennycock (2002); dazu auch Dal Negro (2011). 5 | »[L]inguistic competence must be taken as something that is subject to variation, just as most other linguistic phenomena. ...
Italien ist sprachlich ein sehr heterogenes Land, in dem bis vor kurzer Zeit eine Vielfalt von höchst differenzierten Dialekten und Minderheitensprachen die mündliche Kommunikation geprägt haben und dies teilweise immer noch tun. Auch die historischen Prozesse, die zur Entwicklung und Anerkennung einer einheitlichen Sprache geführt haben, hatten in Italien einen besonderen Verlauf und sind relativ neu, insbesondere was die Vereinheitlichung der mündlichen Sprache betrifft. Schließlich ist auch die Verbreitung der (literarischen) Nationalsprache in allen Schichten der Gesellschaft aufgrund des lange Zeit hohen Analphabetismus unter der Bevölkerung ein relativ junges Phänomen. Die Folge ist, dass ein/e Italiener/in nicht unbedingt italienischsprachig ist. Vor diesem komplexen soziolinguistischen und historischen Hintergrund sollen die gesellschaftlichen und institutionellen Einstellungen im Bereich Migration interpretiert werden. In diesem Sinn ist die Einführung eines schriftlichen Sprachtests für Migrant/innen zur Erlangung der langfristigen
Aufenthaltserlaubnis in Italien ein problematischer Studienfall.
The paper aims to explore the linguistic aspects of the superdiversity that characterises Italian schools. Data were collected through a questionnaire submitted to 316 middle and high school students from Arezzo and Florence, in Tuscany. Both qualitative and quantitative results are presented, showing the role of languages and dialects in the lives of the students, as well as the impact of several factors in shaping their attitudes towards accented speech. Overall, this paper promotes the adoption of a granular conceptualisation of mobility (the regionality index) as a variable representing migratory backgrounds.
Aims and Objectives
The aim of the present study is to address the reciprocal relationship between L2 attitudes and L2 use in a bilingual setting among teenaged L2 learners. Whereas several scholars suggested that L2 attitudes and L2 use mutually facilitate each other, empirical studies have traditionally assessed the relationship between L2 attitudes and L2 use from one direction. Design/Methodology: We propose a complex model that integrates concepts tied to the larger social context surrounding formal L2 teaching, such as attitudes towards L2 speakers and L2 use outside the school, with concepts that are more closely associated with formal L2 teaching, such as L2 motivation and L2 competence. In addition, acknowledging that peers’ opinion is a salient issue for teenagers, we also included L2 related peer norms into the model we propose. Based on earlier research we developed six hypotheses regarding the relationships between the theoretical concepts. Self-report questionnaire data were collected among students in Italian language secondary schools in South Tyrol ( N = 315). The questionnaire included items from well-established and validated measurement instruments. We tested the proposed model with non-recursive path modelling.
Findings/Conclusions
All the hypotheses were substantiated by the data. We found that both L2 attitudes and L2 related peer norms predicted L2 motivation. In addition, a significant interaction emerged between L2 attitudes and peer norms. L2 motivation predicted L2 competence which in turn predicted L2 use. Finally, the results have provided evidence of a reinforcement process, namely, that L2 use can contribute to positive intergroup attitudes.
Originality
To the best of our knowledge, the present paper is the first that utilized non-recursive path modelling in exploring patterns of bilingualism. Significance/Implications: In bilingual settings, L2 use can promote better L2 attitudes. Positive peer norms regarding L2 can counterbalance the effect of negative attitudes on second language acquisition.
My PhD thesis (Le affricate dentali nell’italiano di Bolzano. Un approccio sociofonetico /Dental affricates in the Italian of Bolzano. A sociophonetic approach) represents a very first enquiry on the Italian variety spoken in Bolzano (South Tyrol). The object of the research is very peculiar from a sociolinguistic point of view. Firstly, Italian speakers in Bolzano represents the majority linguistic group, whereas in South Tyrol the most widespread language is German. Secondly, Italian speakers came in Bolzano during the last century from different areas of Italy, thus resulting in a lack of a common dialectal background.
It is interesting to note that no previous study has provided a data-driven definition of the Italian spoken in Bolzano, and the literature in this respect is very poor and conflicting. For this reason, one of main purpose of this thesis was the collection of a huge corpus of spoken Italian of Bolzano, apt for future researches. Then, a sociophonetic approach to the data was preferred, since it allows to see the complex relations among different linguistic and social variables (Foulkes et al. 2010: 704).
Our data consist of 42h 43’ recordings with 42 Italian speakers of different ages, sexes, degrees of education and districts of residence. Each speaker was engaged in a conversation with the researcher, in which it was collected a more semi-spontaneous variety of speech (cfr. Labov 1994). Then, speakers were asked to read a long wordlist consisting of 310 isolated real words presented in isolation on a computer screen, and finally to read 9 tongue-twisters. Among the 310 words there were 68 instances of a dental affricate in different phonological constraints. Each instance was then isolated, and annotated in PRAAT following a specific annotation protocol which has been developed for this analysis.
The analysis focused on three main linguistic parameters: sonority degree, duration, and place of articulation. We tested the distribution of each linguistic parameter
The inspection of the spectrograms has revealed that it exists a sort of intermediate degree between voiced and voiceless dental affricates: in these realizations, which we called intermediate, the occlusive part of the dental affricate presents the typical sonority band, whereas sonority disappears in the following fricative part. Affricates sometimes present a gap between the occlusive and the fricative part, that has been named “post-burst aperiodicity”, following Foulkes & Docherty (2011).
The sociophonetic analysis via SPSS has shown that intermediate voicing characterizes the speech of old and uneducated speakers, but it’s however well attested also in young speakers with low degree of mobility outside the town of Bolzano. Moreover, intermediate voiced affricates occur more frequently in the post-nasal and post-lateral context, which is highly variable throughout Italian regional dialects. On the contrary, the post-burst aperiodicity is more frequently found in speakers with a high degree contact with the German inhabitants of the area, and it characterizes the speech of young, educated men and women.
These data has led to the conclusion that a process of koineization is on-going in the Italian of Bolzano. Following Kerswill & Trudgill, it may be said that the Italian of Bolzano is nowadays levelling the more marked differences in pronunciation, and starting a process of focusing. The emergence of an intermediate degree of sonority in a high-variable phonotactic context has to be interpreted in this way. Moreover, language contact with German might be playing a role in the younger generations, but it doesn’t seem to generally affect the new dialect under formation.
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