Dialect switching in the acquisition of Italian by Romanian immgrants

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2017-06-03
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en
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his research project aims to test, for the first time so far, the way adult Romanian immigrants of the latter migration period - i.e. after 2004 - learn Italian as an L2. The hypothesis is that they learn a Regional Italian and that they show an active or passive - competence in the local vernacular, as do Italian native speakers. In order to test the hypothesis, 12 Romanian immigrants currently residing in Chieti (Abruzzo) have been interviewed, where the local vernacular is named Chietino and is a variety of (Eastern) Abruzzese, an Upper Southern Italian Dialect. Participants - both men and women and older than 20 years-old - performed two tasks, one responding to 29 auditory stimuli that were either a common expression in Chietino (distractors), or a clause of a dialogue where present perfect is used. The last type of clauses aims to add data to a previous survey, conducted by the author, where native speakers were tested: the new data collection was expected to, partially, clarify the selection of the auxiliaries [BE] and [HAVE] in the present perfect conjugation in Chietino, following the work of D’Alessandro & Roberts (2010) for other varieties of Abruzzese. Participants were also interviewed with a Sociolinguistic Questionnaire, in order to add, to gather information about the attitude of Romanians toward Chietino, as a local vernacular compared to Italian, the dominant language.
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Faculteit der Letteren