[Aug. 09, 2007]

From 1860 to 1970, about 6 millions of immigrants left Italy – many of them seeking fortune and higher wages in the United States. Only Ireland (4,400,000) and Germany (5,500,000) came anywhere near these figures. From 1890 to 1900, arrived in the United States 655,888 Italian immigrants. Two-thirds of them were men, who mostly planned to return once they had built up some capital.

Many Italians found unskilled work in America's cities. There were large colonies in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore and Detroit.

From 1900 to 1910 2,100,00 immigrants moved from main Italian ports. Among these, around 40 per cent eventually returned to Italy. Working long hours on low wages, the Italians began to rival the Irish for much of the unskilled work available in industrial areas. Some hostilities broke out between the two groups of workers.

After the First World War, Italians developed a reputation for becoming criminals. This was mainly due to high-profile criminals such as Al Capone and Lucky Luciano. But despite of many common places, the US Department of Justice estimated that less than 0.0025 percent of Italian Americans had anything to do with organized crime. Prejudice against Italians and anarchists contributed to the false conviction of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1921.

But Italian immigration had also a different face. In the 1930s a large number of Italians who had opposed the Fascist rule of Benito Mussolini arrived in the United States, for instance Enrico Fermi and Emilio Segre (both involved in the development of the atom bomb).

By the Second World War there were more people of Italian stock living in New York City than in Rome. Today, over 15.7 million people in the United States identify themselves as Italian Americans. They constitute nearly 6% of the U.S. population.

During this century, integration came mostly through language. Language is culture and, according to the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it influences the way people understand reality and behave with respect to it.

Thus, the study of language contact entails the investigation of the totality of the relations between the languages of the contact and a given environment, as well as the study of the history of their speakers. Francesca Bellù in her very interesting thesis The Italian Language in the United States investigates the connection between Italian and American English in the frame of what she defines language ecology.

The term ecology was first applied to the language sciences in 1972 by Einar Haugen to designate "the study of interactions between any given language and its environment", in this sense the environment is not just the "referential world to which language provide an index (which, in fact, is only the environment of grammar and lexicon) but the society that uses it as one of its codes."

Bellù's work starts from the observation of linguistic behavior of immigrants of first and second generation in the Italian community of Schenectady, N.Y., then it’s developed through "the study of the economic, socio-historical and cultural scenario of the language contact" with a deep examination of institutional support obtained by the Italian language in the U.S. (either through government, religion, education system, or private organizations), and a final analysis of the results of language contact between Italian and English in different ecological contexts.

As reported by Bellù, most of the literature about immigration appears to concur that Italians, at the time of their immigration, held the lowest socio-economic status of any of the largest white immigrant groups in the United States. The racial discrimination and prejudices were mostly against Southern Italians.

This racial discrimination must be considered as one of the most significant and distinctive ecological factors that contributed to hasten the process of language loss in the second-generation in the United States. "Indeed, it was plainly recognized by Italians that, of different people of their descent, those who were regarded as the most 'nearly' American had the advantage over the others in obtaining the more desirable jobs and economic rewards."

Southern Italian dialect, as a plainly evident ethnic marker, was likely to be rapidly abandoned for English, which simultaneously offered the priceless benefit of improving 'meridionali' economic and social condition while erasing a crucial indicator of their stigmatized ethnicity.

Anchoring language to its ecological setting (which implies social, economical, political and in a broader sense, psychological interconnections) becomes essential in the understanding and interpretation of phenomenon such as language shift, language endangerment and language death.

As we can see, linguistic (and cultural) changes can depend on many different factors. In particular environments, where people of different cultures interact, language reflects not only culture but also the social rank of speakers and – in this sense – can be used as means of social alienation and discrimination.