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Most New Zealanders of Italian ancestry today are descendants of the great number of Italian migrants that arrived in New Zealand through migratory chains that originated in Italy around the 1890’s. The most notable of these chains from Italy originated in the southern localities of Massa Lubrense near Sorrento and Stromboli, a volcanic island in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Migrants from these two centres were the first to settle in the Wellington area of Eastbourne, where they quickly developed the first Italian fishing village in New Zealand. Although today most of the people who consider themselves to be of Italian ethnicity in New Zealand are to be found in the Auckland region (Statistics

New Zealand, 2006), the Italian community of Wellington is still generally considered the country’s Italian community par excellence and as such it has been the subject of much written material, academic and otherwise, which has attempted to describe various aspects of Italian migration to this region. The main Italian settlement in Wellington is found in the area of Island Bay which Italian migrants began to inhabit in the 1920s, when many Strombolani fishermen from Eastbourne moved across the bay attracted by better fishing. The other main settlement of Italians in Wellington is that of Avalon in the Hutt valley, where mostly migrants from the Italian provinces of Pistoia, Belluno and Treviso established themselves before World War I and started cultivating the land of the Hutt river valley, growing market vegetables and especially tomatoes.

As it is clear from the history of the community, the Italians in Wellington do not represent a unified and homogeneous group of people, but the community is instead made up of many small groups that originated in different parts of Italy, reached New Zealand at different times and settled in different areas. The Italians who originally settled in Wellington mainly came from three Italian areas: the Veneto (Belluno, Treviso), Campania (Massa Lubrense, Capri, Sorrento) and Sicily (Stromboli) regions. The origins and development of all these groups had a marked effect on the linguistic situation of the community as a whole, and especially on the linguistic repertoire of its first and second-generation speakers. According to the general sociolinguistic situation in Italy at the time of the first migrations, and of the socio-economic conditions of the typical migrants described in Bettoni (1985b), the linguistic repertoire of the Italians who reached New Zealand was, until well after the end of World War II, in most cases a spoken knowledge of their local variety (dialect). It is thought that in Italy after the war dialect-Italian bilingualism became more widespread, but in general the vast majority of migrants who arrived before the 1960s would have had a dialect as their first language. As has been noted by researchers who have looked at Italian migrant communities abroad, it is also very likely that, together with their original language or languages, the migrants took with them attitudes to these varieties born out of the diglossic situation, and more specifically the contemplation of Italian as the ideal language and the prestigious variety of educated Italians, versus the view of the dialect as the language of simple, uneducated and unrefined folk.

With migration to anglophone New Zealand, the Italians had to add English to their linguistic repertoire. Not having had any contact with this language before, they had to learn it as a second language without any formal instruction when they got to New

Zealand. The process was particularly difficult for the early migrants due to the relative geographical and social isolation in which they found themselves.

Although no specific data is available on the linguistic development of the second- generation Italians in Wellington, we can perhaps assume the same processes observed in the Australian and Canadian Italian communities also took place in Wellington, where most probably the children of the original migrants in all likelihood first came into contact with and learned English at school. While, before school age the children were raised in the regional dialect of the parents (and perhaps a small percentage also in Italian) and retained these varieties in the family domain, for the majority, English became the language of all other domains, quickly becoming the dominant language for the second and following generations.

Like Canada and Australia, New Zealand is a relatively young culture that since its creation has been the target of extensive migration from a wide range of sources, contributing to its status as a multi-ethnic and multilingual society. Unlike Canada and Australia, however, New Zealand has no official language policy giving direction or special assistance to the teaching learning or maintenance of immigrant languages (Peddie, 2003, p. 14). As a result of this, the teaching of Italian as a heritage language in New Zealand has been largely left in the hands of individual immigrant communities, leading to the emergence of Italian Sunday schools for children of immigrant background as part of the activities organised by various Italian social clubs around the country. Adult heritage learners on the other hand, have often had no choice other than to study Italian in traditional foreign language classes, such as those offered by community education institutions (often in form of evening classes) and by universities.

Studies of Italian language in New Zealand are scant. Specific information about the language proficiency, patterns of language use and language attitudes within the community can be found in a study by Camille Plimmer (1994), who conducted a sociolinguistic survey of the Wellington Italian community by collecting data from a sample of sixteen informants focusing on the maintenance and shift of Italian languages. The conclusions of the study pointed to a very pronounced level of language shift for both standard Italian and Italian dialects, especially among members of the second generation, with English being the dominant language in all domains, Italian being used within the community in public situations and dialects only used at home or with close friends and relatives. The study found that all respondents had very positive attitudes towards Italian, although the positive attitude scores for the informants of the first

generation were slightly lower for the dialect than for the official language, reflecting the diglossic situation of Italy when the migrants left the country for New Zealand. The author concluded that the level of language shift within the community had to be attributed mainly to the lack of institutional support for the maintenance of the community language. Her interpretation was driven by the results for the other two kinds of factors, status and demographic, which generally indicated that the community had a very positive and distinctive self image and strong social networks allowing most members participation in a range of community activities promoting language maintenance.

The latest contribution to a description of the linguistic situation of the Wellington Italian community is that of Miranda (2001) which attempted to find a correlation between the attitudes towards and use of Italian varieties among community members of first, second and third generation. Her study confirms Plimmer’s results by showing that English is the most used language within the community in all domains and that dialects are the second most used languages, followed by Italian in third place. The study however shows that proficiency in Italian does not correlate with positive attitudes towards it; in fact the most positive attitudes were recorded from people with little or no competence in Italian. When the correlation attitudes/competence was tested for the dialects, it was found that the speakers with the highest competence in the dialects were the ones to display the most positive attitudes towards the standard variety and also those with the less positive attitudes towards the dialect. According to the author, this is explained by the diglossic position covered by the varieties in the community repertoire, which perfectly reflects observations made in other Italian communities in anglophone countries (Bettoni 1993, p. 416). Most importantly, Miranda’s study showed that the ability to speak Italian (or dialect) did not represent an important element in the participants’ idea of Italianità and that therefore language is not considered a core value or a strong symbol of ethnic identity for this particular community. However, the respondents who expressed the strongest feelings of belonging towards Italian culture were the ones with the highest competence in the dialects, showing perhaps that knowing the heritage language, even a non-standard variety, helps people feel more a part of the parents’ country and culture of origin.