Antonia Rubino

Multilingualism in Australia: reflections on current and future research trends.

This paper gives a critical overview of Australian research in the area of immigrant languages, arguing that this field of study is a significant component of the wider applied linguistics scene in Australia and has also contributed to enhancing the broad appreciation of the cultural and linguistic diversity of the country. It shows that research into immigrant languages has drawn upon a range of paradigms and evaluates those that have been most productively used. The paper argues that new research developments are needed to take into account the changing linguistic landscape of Australia and the increased fluidity and mobility of current migration.

‘Racial Laws Turned Our Lives Positively’: Agentivity and Chorality in the Identity of a Group of Italian Jewish Witnesses

This chapter explores the interviews conducted with a small group of Italian Rome-based Jews who are ‘witnesses of the racial laws’. Born in the 1930s, they are children of Jews who were persecuted under the Mussolini regime 1 and, together with the very few camp survivors, are the last living voices of that period. The term ‘witnesses of the racial laws’ defines these interviewees’ ‘historically acquired identity’ (Schiffrin, 2002, p. 310) and is a term they use to distinguish themselves from the ‘Holocaust survivors’, as the interviewees for the study presented in this chapter experienced the German persecutions in Italy in a painful, bitter and mortifying way albeit with less cruelty than much less fortunate others. The relationship of our group of Italian Jews to the Shoah is a complex mixture of their continually renewing grief for those millions who were killed in various ways and respect and awe for the few who survived. As will be shown, these witnesses’ stories depart from the traditional accounts of the camp survivors who often engage, like Primo Levi’s memoirs, with the inevitable traps of memory, and ‘emphasize the emotional difficulties of retelling and the profound effect of living with memories that subvert the everyday construction of the self’ (Kyrmayer, 1996, p. 182). Following Langer (1991 in Kirmayer, 1996, p. 183), we will discuss how in their role as public speakers within the project in which they are active members, the Memory Project (Progetto Memoria), our interviewees seem to have found a form of ‘compensating’, and hence pacifying, recall of the past.

From Qualitative to Quantitative Data: Language Choice in the Family

This chapter aims to link the findings from the micro-level interactional analysis to broader patterns of language choice and use, as they emerge from a quantitative survey conducted in the sociology of language paradigm. The purpose is to complement the conversational data collected in the family with a larger sample of self-reported language use in the family, in order to confirm the trends identified in the talk gathered within the two families as representative of a large section of the Sicilian-Australian community. In other words, the aim is to broaden the perspective proposed in this volume by relating the interactional and case study approach to the quantitative picture of the situation of trilingualism.

From Bilingualism in Sicily to Trilingualism in Australia

The participants of my study are two families who migrated from Sicily to Australia in two successive waves of the mass migration movement that took place after the Second World War (cf. Introduction).

Trilingual Talk in Family A

In this section we meet Family A and learn about their migration history. While most information was elicited during my first visits to them, other details were gathered through observation and occasional comments by family members throughout the fieldwork.

Approaches to Multilingual Talk

In order to analyse the trilingual conversations of my Sicilian-Australian participants, I draw on the interactional perspectives that have been adopted in the study of multilingualism.1 The main purpose of this chapter therefore is to place my analytical approach within a broad theoretical framework. As will be shown, I give priority to the socio-functional and more specifically the identity-related explanation of language alternation2 (Gafaranga, 2007a), to the preference of other approaches (for example grammatical or psycholinguistic).

The Context of Italian Migration

For many centuries Italians have been leaving their home in search of better lives in great numbers, to the extent that some historians talk of them as ‘among the most migratory of peoples on the earth’ (Gabaccia, 2000: 1). Migration took on epic dimensions particularly after Italy became a unified country in 1861, and between 1876 and 1976 about 26 million Italians left the country (Favero and Tassello, 1978). Mass migration stopped in the 1970s, thanks to the considerable improvements in social and economic conditions, and in that same decade Italy became a country that attracted, rather than produced, migrants (Castles, 1992: 37).