Investigating insertional code-mixing in Italian migrants in the United Kingdom: A comparative approach

Aims: This article investigates English lexical insertions in a corpus collected with first- and second-generation Italian migrants in two English cities, namely Bedford and Cambridge. It aims to establish whether, and to what extent, two Italian heritage communities share the same patterns of language alternation. Methodology/approach: I describe the frequency and type of lexical insertions to verify whether the study of lexical insertions or insertions of multiword units can shed light on the linguistic repertoire of each of the communities. The two Italian communities share many social features but differ in the ways Italians integrated or not into the host society. Data analysis: The dataset used for this contribution was collected through qualitative interviews with Italian migrants belonging to three different generations: first, second, and intermediate generations. The corpus used in this paper consists of approximately 50 hours of speech (35 hours for Bedford and 15 hours for Cambridge). I correlated the insertions of single lexemes with semantic and pragmatic specificity from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Conclusions/results: The results provided evidence that insertion is first influenced by specificity as already Backus argued. External parameters such as migrants’ employment, ethnic composition of the social network, the size of the migrant community, and its social visibility do not, therefore, affect the borrowability of the lexemes belonging to specific domains, the frequency of which leads to their entrenchment as English lexemes even when speakers adopt the monolingual mode in Italian or dialect. The two communities do, however, differ in terms of the matrix language into which the English insertion is embedded: Italians prefer Italian as the matrix language in Cambridge but not in Bedford. Originality: The study confirms how similar Italian communities can be characterized by different linguistic usage and by a different linguistic repertoire.