Irresistible Changes in Languages: Cases Studies
Abstract
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One of the largest ethnic groups in the Toronto area is of Italian origin. Immigration from Italy began in the nineteenth century, reached its peak in the mid 1960s, and continued at a decreasing rate until the last decade of the twentieth century. The turning point in the rate of immigration was 1968, when a change in the Canadian immigration policy, which now required a higher level of education, caused a sudden decline: whereas a total of 30,055 Italians entered Canada in 1967, only 8,533 came in 1970, and these were in general better educated.
The community now includes first- second- and third-generation Canadians of Italian descent, namely immigrants, their children and their grand-children. When first-generation immigrants settled in Toronto, their linguistic background included a regional dialect of Italy, which they spoke fluently as their mother tongue, and a variety of Italian, which they spoke less fluently as an acquired language. In most cases, Italian was used intermingled with the native dialect, in a linguistic habit determined by the speaker’s degree of education, which generally ranged from no schooling at all (a condition of total illiteracy) to secondary school. Neither the regional dialect nor Italian, in the variety and complexity known by the immigrant population, had ever been confronted with a social reality comparable to the one Italian immigrants had to contend with immediately upon their arrival. The new work environments, urban setting, and institutional order of society caused their language to evolve in a way that would enable them to meet the new needs in communication. The resulting language is what is generally known as Italiese. My purpose in this paper is to examine the evolutionary mechanism by which Italiese came into being and to describe its chief distinguishing features in relation to English, Italian and the regional dialects originally spoken by the Italian immigrant population.
Among the features to be discussed are (i) modifications of phonotactic restrictions in relation to the natural resistance of language to structural changes, (ii) the assimilation of English phonemes, and (iii) lexical augmentation by means of loans, loanshifts, and loanblends. Finally (iv) the distinction between necessary and luxury loans will be analysed in terms of lexical insufficiency in the language of origin and in relation to basic memetic mechanisms of linguistic conformity.