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Health Literacy, Migration Traumas, Narrative Medicine and the Language Desk. New practices in translingualism and educational processes
77-94Views:34Health literacy (HL) is a complex field encompassing a range of public health education and communication activities that are crucial for interacting with the health care system. In a sustainable world, future healthcare must be accessible to all, and we must ensure that people from migrant backgrounds have got the resources to manage their health. Inequalities in immigrants’ health profiles, a sign of ineffective integration policies, could be mitigated by improving HL levels. The aim of the study was to investigate the space given to HL within formal immigrant learning contexts; the study featured a questionnaire that was intended as a probe into some specific needs and discomforts connected with the condition of translingualism and with the related trauma, which may have a negative impact on language learning. Such interweaving offers a different perspective that generates new teaching practices and the creation of a Language Desk that through language, health literacy and narrative medicine promotes equitable, safe and sustainable learning contexts that enhance the experience of translingualism in all its forms.
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Secondary school adolescents: identity, languages and hereditary languages. The case of the provinces of Biella and Vercelli
87-109Views:216This contribution is part of the tradition of heritage languages and linguistic and cultural identity. It mainly deals with the perception of the identity of students of non-Italian nationality or origin and their relationship with the language and the culture of origin, and those of the host community. More and more children and young people of non-Italian origin are present in Italian schools: the integration model pursued in Italy wants to respect cultural differences and language is one of the key elements of this process. The research concerned two provinces of Eastern Piedmont: Biella and Vercelli. Using a sociolinguistic and sociologic approach, a study was carried out through the administration of questionnaires concerning language and identity, the motivation towards integration, the perception and attitude towards one’s own language/culture of origin, and the Italian language/culture. The emerging picture presents sometimes ambiguous attitudes that can be defined almost as a “suspension” between the desire for “Italianisation” and the preservation of one’s roots. The research poses stringent questions schools and society are called to address on the construction (or reconstruction) of their own identity.
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Linguistic and cultural contacts between the two shores of the Adriatic. The Italian of Albanian writers
69-86Views:212Migrant literature is a powerful medium of expression which offers a great variety of interpretation and a great source of inspiration for scholars to investigate the different aspects of the life and those of the society. Finding themselves in-between, migrant authors have the opportunity to live (in) two or more languages and cultures bringing them together, changing and shaping them. It is precisely here where linguistic contact occurs and where different strategies take place becoming an interesting part of a linguistic and literary research. This article investigates the contact between Albanian and Italian language through the analysis of some of the works of Ornela Vorpsi, Artur Spanjolli, Ron Kubati and Anilda Ibrahimi. Taking into consideration the fact that these authors has decided to use Italian as their language of expression, this investigation offers some considerations of what this means to them and the impact on both languages. Considering the fact that these writers transfer in their texts not only important aspects of the culture but also some features of the Albanian language, it is interesting to see the way in which transference takes place and what happens to the text when two different and distant languages such as Albanian and Italian meet.
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«Odio finanche la lingua che si parla». Power and freedom in Vincenzo Consolo's Nottetempo, casa per casa
85-95Views:21The essay studies the relationships between the novel Nottetempo, casa per casa and the linguistic considerations disseminated by Consolo in other texts. Consolo does not limit himself to criticising the language of fascism but broadens his critical analysis to the language of power as such and the languages of opposition, when they are tainted by empty rhetoric. In this sense, the protagonist’s final escape also takes on a palingenetic value from a political point of view
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The VVV project: lexicography, IT and social networks at the service of linguistic promotion
136-149Views:169This contribution is based on a project in lexicography and provides important insight about the promotion of Valoc’, an endangered dialect spoken in Val Masino (Lombardy, Italy). The aim of the VVV project is to develop the new dictionary, based on anthropological and dialectological research. Thanks to our methodological approach we aim to observe practices of Valoc’, its transmission from one generation to another and discourses mainly supporting ideologies in relation to language practices and identity. In this paper, we would like to present the context, described from a linguistic and sociolinguistic point of view, focusing on the importance of promoting Valoc’ through lessons, conferences, the dictionary and social network. In fact, thanks to our haven in social network, it was possible to observe the evolution of the language and analyse the way speakers deal with the exercise of writing.
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The evolution of referential and predicational strategies in parliamentary debates on Italian immigration laws
Views:150This article presents the evolution of the use of two words in parliamentary debates, immigrato and extracomunitario, frequently used in Italian language in reference to a foreign person entering the country with the aim of staying. The corpus consists of the transcripted texts of the parliamentary debates related to eight laws on immigration between 1986 and 2019, analysed with both quantitative and qualitative methods. Collocations and co-occurences with verbs and adjectives are taken into consideration, as well as figurative language.
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Translations belles infidèles. Comments to those of Domenico Tempio's oily compositions
161-182Views:384Belles infidèles is a French expression highlighting a well-known problem in translating from one language to another. This is true especially in the field of literature and particularly in poetry, where the exterior aspects of the words (for example, the harmony of rhymes, the images, the emotional vibrations, the semantic fields, the polysemy, and so on) become substantial and hardly translatable. The essay focuses on some bad translations of some selected verses from the obscene poems by a 18th-century Sicilian dialect poet, Domenico Tempio: they clearly show the translators’ intervention, who took many liberties and betrayed the formulation, the sense and the effect of the original texts. The essay proposes some more faithful translations of them.
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The waves of languages between emigration and immigration: the Italian case
160-176Views:42The contribution fits within the existing research on the state of health of Italian abroad. It proposes the preliminary results on the linguistic imagination of a qualitative and quantitative research carried out in Toronto in 2022 that involved 100 informants of Italian origin belonging to different migratory generations. The results of the research highlight the pluralistic value of the linguistic imagination of the informants in which Italian strongly competes with other languages within a space of communicative possibilities. They refer to the traditional Italian language space both in Italy, with dialects, and abroad, with Italiese in the Canadian research context.
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“I can't write English, not even Italian... give me any 'giobba'": the Italian emigrants in the theater of Nino Randazzo
56-68Views:173The paper examines the cultural, social and linguistic representation of Italians emigrated to Australia in the writing for the theatre of Nino Randazzo, a playwright of Aeolian origin, who emigrated to Melbourne in 1952, considered one of the most important and prolific authors in the context of the so-called “letteratura dell’emigrazione”, and more particularly the Italian-Australian literature in italian language. Of particular interest is the theme of cultural and social prejudices of Anglo-Australians towards people of Italian origin, labelled as ignorant, impossible to acculturate and to discipline, largely linked to criminal organizations, which mostly speak a mixed variety of Italian and English. Thus, in particular, in the comedy Il Sindaco d’Australia (1981), in which the stereotypical (but hilarious) image of the emigrant from the south of Italy, impulsive and ambitious, characterized on a linguistic level by the use of Italian-Australian terms; and in the comedy Victoria Market (1982), conceived by Randazzo as a protest against the tendency on the part of Anglo-Australians to build stereotypes towards Italian-Australians, in this case the one that Italian equals mafioso. Randazzo’s theatre, however, manages to distinguish itself from the works of the majority of first-generation Italian-Australian playwrights for its attempt to demystify such prejudices and clichés in an enjoyable way. It is in the choice of a popular tone of comedy, also achieved through the skilful mixing of more traditional Italian forms with Italian-Australian terms typical of the years in which the narrated events are set, that the specific aspects in this author lay.
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Egalitarian utopias and enlightened reformism in Domenico Tempio's La Carestia
17-30Views:27La Carestia of the Sicilian poet Domenico Tempio is an allegorical satirical poem that fits into the tradition of southern enlightened reformism, feeding the utopia of peace and social egalitarianism. The article analyzes some frame of the work to grasp the thrust for the renewal of eighteenth-century poetry, through a stylistic use of the poetic language that oscillates between coloriture markedly expressionist and equally visible traces of formal classicism.
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Dictionaries, synonymies and usage labels
108-122Views:282The extraordinary richness of the Italian language is not always adequately enhanced by dictionaries. In the era of the digitization of the dictionary, while outdated some definitional procedures continue to survive. Present or past participles that also have adjective functions (e.g. nascente) are sometimes defined with the formula “In the meanings of the verb”. The nouns indicating quality, condition or status (e.g. ordinariness) are often defined with the formula “being + basic adjective (ordinary)”. These definitions, whose informative value is practically zero, certainly do not help to the reader. The structure of a dictionary of synonyms is completely different, which must try to guide the reader in the maze of possible lexical alternatives with the aim of helping him to find the most suitable terms to express the different nuances of the same concept. The search for semantic equivalences thus becomes a discovery of the relevant differences that exist between one word and another. Of essential importance in this regard is the function of the usage labels: the distinction between basic words, words of high use, words of high availability and common words, very useful in many areas, is not of great help for a writer interested in information stylistic. The classification by frequency bands does not warn us e.g. that volto is of higher register than faccia, autovettura is of more formal register than macchina, cinematografo in the sense of ‘cinema hall’ is antiquated compared to cinema
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Translate or not, foreign words
8-37Views:98In the early twentieth century, Gabriele D’Annunzio successfully proposed tramezzino instead of the English sandwich. Equally successful are some proposals formulated by Bruno Migliorini in the 1930s: autista and regista for the French chauffeur and régisseur. However, the original coinages of Arrigo Castellani in 1987 fail to take root: fubbia for smog, guardabimbi for babysitter, intredima for weekend, velopattino for windsurf, and vendistica for marketing. At the beginning of the 2000s, the volume by Giovanardi, Gualdo, and Coco Italian – English 1-1 reopened the debate among scholars. In 2015 the petition “Dillo in italiano”, launched by Annamaria Testa, achieved enormous success and demonstrated the intolerance of a large part of public opinion towards the massive influx of anglicisms. Following the petition, the Accademia della Crusca established the Incipit Group, a group of experts responsible for monitoring the entry of new anglicisms and suggesting possible Italian alternatives. In 2017, the Nuovo Devoto-Oli dictionary included in its lemmary the section Per dirlo in italiano, containing over 200 cards, that trace a brief history of as many English words or phrases that have penetrated Italian, explaining their meaning and context of use and suggesting a possible Italian equivalent. Il Nuovo Devoto-Oli broadly welcomes the most common anglicisms, helping those who do not know their precise meaning; but at the same time it has no reluctance to propose an Italian alternative, in the profound belief that such an approach is helpful to the reader and makes a positive contribution to the Italian language itself.