Author:

Keywords:

heritage Italian, variation, Arts & Humanities, Literature, Romance, Literature, 2003 Language Studies, 2004 Linguistics, 2005 Literary Studies, 4703 Language studies, 4705 Literary studies

Abstract:

This article questions the long-standing assumption that heritage Italian can be characterized as italiano popolare on account of a number of similar non-standard features. It is argued that this is a problematic comparison due to some methodological lacunae in research into heritage Italian and that a systematic corpus-based analysis is needed in order to reveal its underlying sociolinguistic dynamics. This study focuses on a corpus of Italian spoken by the Italian community in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) and presents a multivariate analysis of a set of morphosyntactic simplification features that have been labelled as typical of italiano popolare. It will be shown that the features of heritage Italian clearly correlate to a set of traditional language contact variables (e.g., contact with the home language and intergenerational transmission). This variation pattern shows that heritage Italian can no longer be connected to italiano popolare in the original sense of the term (viz. an interlanguage or diastratically lower regional Italian).