Italian in Transit and the GörliPark Corpus

Marta Lupica Spagnolo

Italian in Transit

Multilingualism is widely recognized as a socially and scientifically relevant topic. However, the outcome (of fragments) of languages that are temporarily acquired on the move during a person’s lifetime remains largely unexplored. This project tries to fill this gap by investigating a continuum of multilingual practices based on the Italian language, for which the label ‘Italian in Transit’ is proposed (Lupica Spagnolo 2023).

Italian in Transit competences are acquired by multilingual migrants and refugees along their migration or escape routes in Italy and are occasionally reactivated after moving to other countries. As they develop in situations of intense language contact and are reactivated in extremely precarious communicative situations, Italian in Transit practices show similarities with both heritage languages and leaner varieties of Italian acquired without supervision in Italy. However, Italian in Transit is neither an in-group code nor a sociolinguistically dominant language in the new places of residence. This predisposes it to develop distinctive linguistic features, partly influenced by contact with other languages, partly accelerating grammaticalization processes in colloquial Italian, and partly determined by more general principles also at work in the pidgin and creole languages. These include, for example, the generalization of present infinitives to express durative, background events (Lupica Spagnolo 2023), specific patterns of code-switching and language choice (Lupica Spagnolo in press), and the variable realization of sentence negation through semi-innovative constructions.

The GörliPark corpus

My dataset, the GörliPark corpus, consists of twenty-three interviews conducted in Italian with multilingual migrants and refugees working as street vendors in a park in the city of Berlin, Germany.

The data was collected in several phases from October/December 2018 to November 2022. The conversations mainly focus on the participants’ language biographies and migratory experiences, as well as on their language uses in the German capital. The corpus has been transcribed using the software ELAN.

The interviewees are all male and mostly come from sub-Saharan West Africa, in particular The Gambia, Senegal, and Guinea. Because of the sociolinguistic situations in the countries, they lived in, and their intricate migration routes, their language repertoires are very complex (= superdiverse).

The majority of the participans have learned Italian  because they lived in one or more Italian cities over a variable period of time (from nine months up to nine years). However, two speakers have acquired Italian competencies after moving to Berlin. The Italian skills of the participants are highly variable both inter- and intraspeaker.  Nevertheless, an analysis of position and form of sentence negation points out that all participants (except for one) have overcome a pre-basic stage and speak basic up to post-basic learner varieties of Italian. In Berlin, the participants occasionally reactivate their Italian language skills for different communicative purposes.