ACCIONES VARIABLES

Italian post-war migration to the UK has presented interesting elements, which partially distinguish it from the migratory flows towards other Anglophone countries. Firstly, Italian migration towards the UK only became a mass phenomenon after the Second World War, while Italians started to mass migrate to the USA at the end of the nineteenth century, and this con- tinued until after the Second World War (Gabaccia, 2013). In the USA, Italian migrants created Italian communities in the first decades of the twentieth century, while, in the UK, they did this only after the Second World War. Thus, we can say that even the historical community of Italians in the UK is “young” as compared to the Italian-American community.

35 Secondly, the system of migration to the UK, bulk employment (see sub-section above), gave birth to communities formed of people coming from the same villages in Italy and residing in the same neighbourhood in small industrial towns. Speaking the same dialect, these migrants did not usually need to form a koiné of dialects as generally happened in the USA (Tosi, 1984). On the contrary, in the cities of the United States, the high concentration of migrants from all Italian regions in the same neighbourhood favoured the development of dialectal koines to overcome intelligibility issues (Haller, 1987). Dialectal koines, which have been studied in the USA mostly, were influenced by the contact of dialects with English, from which Italian mi- grants borrowed several lexical items. The mixing of dialects and the adaptation of borrowings to the dialects’ morho-syntactical systems generated the variaties shared by Italian migrants in the USA (Haller, 1987; Menarini, 1939; 1947). Haller (1987) describes in detail the language of Italian migrants settled in New York, in the area of Long Island, explaining that elements of different dialects are found in the language used by speakers coming from different regions. He adds that Italian migrants worked together to the creation of a common dialectal “Italian- American lingua franca” (1987: 397). Haller also highlights that English as well as dialects provided material for such a koiné. For instance, in the sentence below, we find peccosa, which is the adaptation of ‘because’, into the phonology of the dialectal lingua franca:

1. “me piaciss' stu calabrese però nu troppu assai ... peccosa no tantu me piace perchè mi piace parlare bene” (1987: 401).

(Standard Italian: “mi piace questo calabrese però non molto … perchè non tanto mi piace perchè mi piace parlare bene”. English translation: “I like this Calabrese (dialect) but not too much … because I don’t like it too much because I like speaking correctly”).

By contrast, in the UK, small homogenous communities usually preserved their local languages, being less affected by the need to communicate with people coming from other villages (Di Salvo, 2014; 2015; 2018). Moreover, their contact with English people was re- duced due to the nature of the jobs they were hired to do. Working mainly in brick factories and being hired in bulk with other fellow countrymen, their contact with English people was minimal. The situation of those who migrated to London would be different. In London, Ital- ians were mainly employed in the food and catering sector, and so they had to learn to deal with a multi-ethnic range of customers and to use English as a linguistic medium (Barni, 2011).

The third distinctive element of the emigration to the UK is that men and women mi- grated at the same time. For this reason, the communities in the UK seemed immediately more

36 stable, compared, for instance, to those settled in America, which were formed mainly of men wishing to earn their fortune and then return to the homeland. The migrants in the UK rapidly gave birth to their offspring and this element concerned the British government, who adopted an Anglicisation policy to integrate the children of the migrants. The children of the migrants were encouraged to abandon their mother tongue by British institutions. To discourage the use of the mother tongue, British schools accepted only a few students with the same ethnic back- ground in each class (Tosi, 1991). However, this policy contrasted with the needs of the parents who felt it necessary to maintain the native language due to their wish to return to the homeland after a while. The “myth of the return” of Italian migrants in the UK (Ganga, 2006) is a factor which influenced the linguistic intention of the Italian families, even if, in the end, the return did not happen. As Tosi explains in his overview of the situation of the Italian language in the UK (1984; 1991), the Italian families mostly continued to speak in their local dialects, and only later did they introduce elements of regionalised or spoken Italian, following linguistic change in the homeland. Generally speaking, the second and third generations of Italian migrants in the UK experienced a linguistic conflict between the host country policies and their (grand)par- ents’ wishes. In the USA, on the contrary, the shift from Italian to English in the second and third generations happened naturally, since the first generation of Italian migrants was prone to abandoning the native language to better integrate into American society. Moreover, contact with the homeland was less frequent for Italians living in the USA and, therefore, Italian was less necessary for maintaining contacts with relatives who remained in Italy, while the neces- sity of using Italian with relatives and friends during frequent trips to the homeland encouraged the maintenance of the native language in the communities settled in the UK. To encourage contact with the homeland and, as the parents and older relatives were speakers of dialect, Italian started to be taught in private schools. As in Australia (Rubino, 2002), in the UK, Italian associations created Saturday schools and doposcuola in which the children of migrants could go to learn standard Italian (Sprio, 2013).

As we have seen, the final element that characterises Italian emigration to the UK is the proximity between the homeland and the host country. This proximity facilitated contact with the native language and encouraged the idea of return (Barni, 2011), even in a period where communications and connections were not as easy as nowadays. As we saw, this affected the need for children of migrants to learn the Italian language. The possibility of frequent visits to the homeland may have also impacted the linguistic practices of Italians migrants in the UK, and not only that of their children. However, this element is not considered in linguistic studies

37 of these communities. The review of the linguistic studies on the historical Italian communities in the UK explains the linguistic repertoire of past migrants, and this is relevant to determine the similarities and differences of the repertoires of the new migrants. In sub-section 5.5.1. we will see that post-crisis migrants not only do not create a dialectal koiné, but they also do not recur to dialect when engaging in translanguaging. Moreover, post-crisis migrants’ translanguaging seems to be informed and shaped by the previous migrants’ linguistic prac- tices. As we will understand, post-crisis migrants refuse past migrants’ translingual realisations due to the features that these index. I present here examples of translanguaging instances col- lected in studies on past Italian migrants to clarify the differences between past and contempo- rary migrants’ translingual realisations. The following section highlights the sociolinguistic similarities between two geographically distant contexts - British and Australian - and it there- fore supports the choice of using studies carried out in Australia to comparatively analyse the new generation of Italian migrants settling in London.