Tre ondate migratorie tra italiano e inglese: usi e funzioni dell’alternanza di codice

This paper focuses on code-switching to and from English in a corpus of spoken Italian collected from Italian migrants living in the English city of Cambridge. It compares the use of English by Italian migrants belonging to three different migratory waves: those who settled in England after the Second World War, those who settled in the UK in the seventies and eighties, and those who arrived in the last 15 years. Adopting a qualitative and interactional perspective, the paper compares the use of English in these three groups in order to identify common strategies of code-switching and the specific features of each migratory wave. The
data shows evidence of different linguistic behaviours. Of the three groups under investigation, the first tend to switch between English and Italian to express their affiliation with or dissociation from the host society, while the other two demonstrate a more hybrid use of the languages in their multilingual repertoire.