Language maintenance-attrition among generations of the Venetian-Italian community in Anglophone Canada

Abstract

This study reports on language contact phenomena among the Italian-Venetian \ncommunities of Anglophone Canada. The analysis perspective is twofold: on one hand \nit studies language maintenance/attrition comparing two cohorts of migrants, those \nalready well researched who migrated during the period of mass migration (1945-1967) \nand those who did so in the following four decades (1970-2009). On the other, it \ninvestigates language maintenance/attrition taking an intergenerational perspective on \nthree generations of speakers. \nThe corpus used in the analysis is composed of 56 interviews, collected during three \nmonths of fieldwork in Canada in 2009. These data were supplemented by 99 \nquestionnaires, which set the background of the analysis, discussing in particular the \nlinguistic habits and attitudes of the community investigated. Given the huge amount of \ndata considered and the mainly quantitative approach taken in this research, two \nstatistical software programs, Taltac and SPSS, were employed to help with the analysis. \nAnother tool, meta-linguistic observation, is also used to broaden the general framework \nof the study and whenever possible support it with more evidence. \nThe literature on language maintenance/attrition among Italian migrant communities is \nsizeable; however, there remains room for further investigations. This work, in \nparticular, addresses two major aspects still rarely explored: first, quantifying the \ndecline in heritage language skills on a generational scale, and secondly, comparing the \nlinguistic skills of post-Second World War migrants, on which research has mostly \nconcentrated so far, with those of new waves of migrants. \nAlthough this thesis is concerned with a particular geographical and historical \nframework and the findings are therefore representative of this specific context, the \nwork aims to point to some observations from which generalisation may be possible. By \nsetting side by side these two very distinct cohorts and discussing the new linguistic \ntendencies in language proficiency among the most recent groups of migrants, research \nis opened to the new scenarios evolving among Italian communities abroad.

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