ABSTRACT
In this chapter I focus on one of the languages that has migrated most in the last few centuries and, as a consequence, undergone such metamorphoses that it is now called by its plural name to represent its multifarious identities: from English to Englishes. The chapter will focus in particular on the new Englishes of migrations influenced and shaped by the use of ICTs. It will examine their global/local audiences and the phenomenon of virtual language migrants who use English varieties as linguae francae for specific purposes within communities who do not need to be physically in the same place but share virtual spaces of communication. Language is one of the main means, tools and products of human migration. At the interface between nature and technology, language is the result of human evolution and has always been a cultural instrument contributing to and representing development and change. It is the first and most complex communication technology humankind has developed, inextricably wired in the human brain and constitutive of it. Languages are also among the most relevant communicative technologies involved directly and indirectly in migrations; native languages that migrants bring to their new country become insufficient for their communicative needs whilst remaining one of the loci of psychological, social and cultural identity. The new language(s) migrants encounter are at first a communication barrier comprising an incomprehensible system of oral and written signs which then impact psychologically on the personality of individuals and groups; indeed, their linguistic inability to express themselves causes adults to revert to child-like verbal skills. The new language, however, is also the means to gain access to the new culture, the tool to interpret it and change it from within. Thus the result of migrations are bilingual, trilingual, multilingual groups of people who code-switch from one language or language variety to another, adapting to contexts and events but also reinterpreting and shaping them and in so doing influencing and changing the local communities. Languages are so engrained in our nature that we speak of them in human terms; they belong to families and form family trees with parent, daughter and sister languages. For instance Latin is the parent language to French and Italian which are referred to as daughters to Latin and sisters to each other; continuing the human metaphor, they can be mother tongues or second languages to their speakers. They evolve, become endangered and die; they migrate along with the individuals who use them and give birth to new linguistic varieties, groups and families. The dominant metaphor, which blends and confuses nature and culture, represents languages as living beings mirroring and shaping our life (Cameron 2007).
