Chapter 8 Italian as heritage language in third generations on social networks: Morphosyntactic code-switching features

Abstract

The chapter illustrates the first results deriving from an ongoing qualitative study on the parlato-digitato [spoken-typed] (Campagnone 2014) of Italian migrants’ online communities. In the context of intergenerational transmission, the dominant language often prevails over the heritage language. Nevertheless, some forms of heritage language survive in younger generations that are native speakers in their family’s immigration country’s language. These new generations seldom share the same values, symbols, and linguistic system of their birthplace. However, as significant studies have shown, “abilities in the heritage language persist, but the bilingualism is typically heavily imbalanced in favor of the dominant language” (Polinsky and Scontras 2019: 2). This imbalance causes what at first sight seems a remnant of the grandparents’ language, in particular starting from the third generation (Bettoni 2008; Rubino 2014). These latter manifestations have been elicited in face-to-face communication, but not via digital communication. Otherwise, in a context of formal writing, the same subjects rarely use Italian as they perceive it clearly as an extremely weak competence (Prifti 2013; Turchetta and Vedovelli 2018). Digital communication on social networks exhibits the same looseness of the spoken language. Spoken-typed language is overcoming the traditional distinction between written and spoken languages. It is a written communication with a strong interactive component that configures a variety of languages on its own (Berruto 2004). This research represents the first application of this ontological category to Italian as a heritage language. The qualitative research presented is based on the linguistic analysis of three Facebook groups where we can observe the linguistic behaviour of third generation heritage language speakers in the USA. The analysis examines 2,150 cases of linguistic contact. Finally, the analysis focuses on code-switching in an interactional perspective and provides a detailed scrutiny of morphosyntactic integration. In assessing data, we detected contact phenomena and relevant features at a morphological and syntactical level: we can observe cases of morphological integrations consisting of dialectal or Italian lexical units combined with English inflectional morphology and vice-versa.