Mi-a rupt scatolele. Phenomena of language contact in the conversation of bilingual Romanian families with Italian L2

Abstract

The migration of people implies, among other things, the migration of their languages and the consequent contact between different codes. In turn, the linguistic contact, very often and to varying degrees, leads to mixing and ultimately to hybridism between languages. Romanian, one of the so-called “immigrant languages”, has been massively present in the Italian panorama for more than 20 years and is spoken as a native language by 1 out of 5 foreigners. This work offers a representative outlook of a widespread phenomenon in migratory contexts, namely code-mixing, by Italian/Romanian bilingual speakers during interactions between bilingual compatriots. More precisely, the aim of the contribution is to analyse the peculiarities of the code-mixing phenomena between the two languages which, despite a good structural equivalence, present some points of discontinuity. The analysed corpus consists of 15 hours of recordings of spontaneous speech between the members of two families of Romanian immigrants in Italy.

A qualitative analysis was conducted which led to the recognition of potential switching points between the two codes, and of constraints sometimes different from those indicated in previous studies of linguistic interference. The government constraint, for instance, does not always apply, whereby there is code-switching between noun phrases filling argumentative positions (subject, object, predicate of a copulative verb) and verbal phrases in mutual dependence within the sentence; moreover, the complementizer often follows the language of the proposition it governs, rather than that of the proposition it is governed by. Furthermore, in our corpus, it has not always been possible or appropriate to identify a Matrix Language: this is easily recognisable where the two codes tend to diverge, as in the construction of explicit (in Romanian)/ implicit (in Italian) subordinates, but temporarily suspended when the degree of congruent lexicalisation increases. This would seem to suggest a need to use constraints in a less absolute and totalizing way.