Language And Society In A Changing Italy

This book examines the interrelation between language and society in contemporary Italy. It aims to provide an up to date account of linguistic diversity, social variation, special codes and language varieties within Italian society, and in situations of language contact both within and outside Italy.

This collection takes a cross-disciplinary, transnational approach and gathers together essays from a range of subjects including linguistics, film studies, folk music, oral and written narrative, and history, which provide new comparative perspectives on the questions surrounding the mutual influence between Italian and U.S. cultures. The volume also showcases new research - quantitative, interpretative, and archival - which contributes to the study of cultural contact. It therefore offers new evidence to answer a question which has long been pivotal in various disciplines and research fields (from historical linguistics to cultural anthropology) - namely, how and to what extent cultural contact can affect long-term historical change?

An examination of Italian immigrants and their children in the early twentieth century, A New Language, A New World is the first full-length historical case study of one immigrant group's experience with language in America. Incorporating the interdisciplinary literature on language within a historical framework, Nancy C. Carnevale illustrates the complexity of the topic of language in American immigrant life. By looking at language from the perspectives of both immigrants and the dominant culture as well as their interaction, this book reveals the role of language in the formation of ethnic identity and the often coercive context within which immigrants must negotiate this process.

Italy has a long and fascinating history that has been recorded since the earliest days of Rome itself: we know how politics, ideas, culture, art, architecture, music and much more, have developed over nearly three millennia. At the heart of the life of the peoples of the Italian peninsula and islands is their language. A Linguistic History of Italy tells the story of how the language spoken in Italy developed from Latin to multiple dialects, to the selection of Florentine for a national written language and how Italian became the common language of the entire nation. At each step on this amazing journey language intertwines with other components of Italian social life. The chapters of A Linguistic History of Italy take you through the history of Italian society, art, ideas and language. The chapters focus on the turning points in language history ¿ when Latin `became¿ Romance, when local dialects were first used in writing, when Florentine was selected as the national language for literature, when Italian became the `national language¿ ¿ and show how those moments only fully make sense when seen in a broader context. The text is written in both English and Italian, so you can improve your linguistic skills while immersing yourself in Italian culture. And the many images give a visual feast of Italian beauty through the centuries.

"Taking as its theme the interaction between Italian and other languages, and marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of Weinreich's seminal Languages in Contact, this volume provides an up-to-date survey of the role of linguistic and cultural interaction in the process of language change. The range of contributions covers: theoretical issues; different forms of language contact in Medieval and Renaissance Italy; dialect transition and diversity in the North and South of Italy; lexical and morphological borrowings; register and syntactic loans in the Romance area; old and new contact varieties of Italian in the Mediterranean, including Malta and North Africa; and, finally, Italian under pressure from English in EU institutions. The volume is published in memory of Joseph Cremona (1922-2003), and includes a bibliography of his work. Anna Laura Lepschy is Visiting Professor at the Universities of Reading and Toronto, and Emeritus Professor at University College London. Arturo Tosi is Professor of Italian at Royal Holloway, University of London. With the contributions: Peter Matthews - On Re-reading Weinreich's Languages in Contact; Nigel Vincent; Languages in Contact in Medieval Italy; Brian Richardson - Latin and Italian in Contact in Some Renaissance Grammars; Cecilia Robustelli - Latin and Vernacular in Contact in the Sixteenth Century: The Latin Model of Giambullari's Grammar; and, Mair Parry - Markedness, Salience and Language Change: Exploring an Italo-Romance Transition Area. It also includes: John Green - The North-South Axis of Romance: Contact Reinforcing Typology? Martin Maiden - Accommodating Synonymy: How Some Italo-Romance Verbs React to Lexical and Morphological Borrowing; Chris Pountain - Syntactical Borrowing as a Function of Register; Adam Ledgeway - The Dual Complementizer System in Southern Italy: Spirito Greco, Materia Romanza? Rosanna Sornicola - Dialectology and History: The Problem of the Adriatic-Tyrrhenian Dialect Corridor; Alberto Varvaro - The Maghreb Papers in Italian Discovered by Joe Cremona; Joseph Brincat - Languages and Varieties in Use in Malta Today: Maltese, English, Italian, Maltese English and Maltaliano; and, Arturo Tosi - Languages in Contact with and without Speaker Interaction."

The Routledge History of Italian Americans weaves a narrative of the trials and triumphs of one of the nation’s largest ethnic groups. This history, comprising original essays by leading scholars and critics, addresses themes that include the Columbian legacy, immigration, the labor movement, discrimination, anarchism, Fascism, World War II patriotism, assimilation, gender identity and popular culture. This landmark volume offers a clear and accessible overview of work in the growing academic field of Italian American Studies. Rich illustrations bring the story to life, drawing out the aspects of Italian American history and culture that make this ethnic group essential to the American experience.