ABSTRACT
With the millions of Italians who left their country in the course of the last century, in search of opportunity and with hopes of better lives, the dialects became significant speech varieties in Italian communities throughout the world. Of the close to twenty-six million people who emigrated between 1876 and 1970, almost half crossed the oceans. The greatest waves of immigrants originated from the regions of Veneto (13 per cent), Piedmont, Campania, Friuli, Sicily and Lombardy (around 10 per cent each), and settled before the First World War (Corrà and Ursini (1988: 373)), at a time when the dialects were still by far the prevalent speech varieties used in Italian society. The United States became a favourite destination, although large numbers of emigrants also moved to Argentina and Brazil. Following the Second World War, large numbers of predominantly southern Italian immigrants chose North America and Australia, although by that time the industrialized nations of Northern Europe had become the preferred destinations. Depending on the varying socio-economic make-up, the time and itinerary of migrations, the educational backgrounds and linguistic attitudes of arrivals, the levels of community cohesion, and the degree of cultural similarity with the host country, the dialects abroad met a complex fate both in their forms and usage; these have become the object of scholarly research only in recent decades. This chapter will focus on Italian as a community language (CL) in the USA and be based on data gathered from among individuals who arrived in the greater New York metropolitan area during the 1950s and 1960s, and from their descendants (Haller (1993)). Comparisons with other linguistic contexts will be limited to extra-European countries where the more permanent nature of past migrations inhibited contact with the distant metropolitan country.
