Abstract
Near the end of his life, linguist and anthropologist Jan Blommaert gave an interview where he looked back at his career, and at what he had learned about the role of language in society. Talking about his time as a university student in 1980s Belgium, he tells an anecdote that I have started to mention often in my classes. Blommaert recalls opening a book of ‘useful’ phrases in five African languages, as an eager student, just to find phrases like ‘get my car out of the mud’, ‘get your boss’ or ‘lazy people will be punished’ (Docwerkers, 2021). The book, written under the pretence of helping beginners learn new languages, was obviously steeped in a colonial mentality: its intended readers were students of languages, but they were also expected to hold political and economic power over the native speakers of the languages themselves. I have come to use Blommaert's anecdote to discuss with my students (potentially, future language professionals) how any use of language is never ‘innocent’ and never disconnected from relations of power within and across societies. In specific contexts, speakers of certain languages (like English or Spanish) have socio-economic advantages over speakers of other languages (like Wolof or Quechua). Many languages have standard varieties and/or high prestige accents which afford concrete advantages to their users. That ‘is a problem not just of difference, but of inequality’ (Blommaert, 2010: 3). Language, in fact, holds the power to reinforce or subvert the architecture of society.
My role as a teacher and researcher in Italian studies depends largely on the perceived ‘usefulness’ of my native language in a global marketplace, together with the perceived ‘importance’ of certain canonical works of Italian literature and art. My very status as a native speaker of Italian rests partly on my linguistic proficiency, and partly on socio-political divides. The phrase ‘native speaker’ is partly a descriptor of linguistic profiles and partly ‘a personification of the safeguards of unity and continuity that are lodged at critical epistemic boundaries – the boundaries between languages to be exact’ (Chow, 2014: 58). The concept of ‘native speaker’ is often used, for example, to exclude individuals from former colonies from the teaching of English, as several scholars have noted (Canagarajah, 2012; Holliday, 2006). In my case, being a white man with dark hair has possibly played a part in the fact that, to my memory, no one has ever doubted that I was a native speaker of Italian.
As a researcher attempting to provide my contribution to the definition of the ever-evolving conversation that we call ‘Italian culture’, my work engages with individuals who are in a rather different predicament: individuals approaching and using Italian from relatively unsanctioned, unorthodox and disenfranchised perspectives. This research places me in a position where I cannot ignore the political dimension of the language, of my position as a native speaker and of other people's journeys towards the Italian language. Researching multilingual identities is inextricably linked with the recognition of socio-linguistic disparities, and with an awareness of linguistic (in)justice (Piller, 2016). Multilingualism is a lens that enables a researcher to capture a fuller picture of socio-cultural reality; it also contains the possibility of taking an activist stance for a fairer attitude towards language(s) that invests the practice of research, teaching, outreach and the creative arts in innovative ways. But what does it mean to combine multilingual research and multilingual activism?
Linguist Zhu Hua recently noted that ‘while the steer towards impact and public engagement among higher education in some parts of the world has been well received’, research impact on scholars, participants and audiences may not be ‘captured in the so-called “impact narratives”’ (Zhu, 2020: 206), such as the ones that UK-based researchers must present as part of the country's Research Excellence Framework (REF). Beyond countable and tangible outputs, such as community outreach or policy briefs, there is an opportunity that comes with the notion of ‘impact’. Zhu argues that impact may potentially have to do with a deeper level of researchers’ and participants’ awareness of the hierarchies of power that are associated with language and culture. After engaging in conversations, there is a very concrete possibility that the participant(s) and the researcher will not be the same: that they will have learned new things, experienced a new type of connection and potentially seen their worldviews challenged. Seeing research as social action ‘implies that our research embeds, not leads to, impact; and equally importantly, that it is a process of connections and conversations’ (Zhu, 2020: 207).
As researchers in Italian studies, we have the power to reinforce or challenge inequalities in the understanding of Italian culture, ‘impacting’ ourselves and the debate by excluding or including certain voices or phenomena in our research. In my contribution I draw on recent work in applied linguistics, as well as my own research experience, to provide some short reflections on how to consider the role of multilingualism while rethinking Italian studies in a transnational perspective. Within the context of the recent transnational turn in Italian studies, where the discipline works to transcend the idea of italianità beyond its normative borders (Burdett et al., 2020), researching multilingually is a crucial component of the re-imagining of Italian culture. Linguistic diversity has to do with the awareness that Italy is ‘historically a space characterized by both internal and external transit and movement’ being ‘created by the multiple crossings that etch its geographical surfaces and cultural depths’ (Bond, 2014: 421). Researching multilingually (Phipps, 2013) enables a better understanding of the ‘multiple crossings’ mentioned by Bond: an understanding that is not defined by rigid definitions of who is (or is not) Italian and of who speaks (or does not speak) Italian.
A transnational understanding is necessarily guided by a multilingual perspective on the Italian space: the ‘multiple crossings’ mentioned by Emma Bond in her seminal essay have taken place through a variety of languages, dialects, registers, slangs, styles. If we fail to consider – and research as adequately as possible – the multilingual dimensions of these crossings we miss out on a variety of perspectives on the Italian space. Multilingual trajectories cross the Italian space and, in so doing, create innovative relationships between things, words and meanings; they generate paradoxes as they expand the limits and reinvent the meanings of italianità. These perspectives are often subversive, innovative, refreshing; but more importantly, they have a right to be valued and to preserve their dignity. A transnational approach to Italian studies that ‘repositions migration and diasporic communities as direct contributors to the formation of Italian culture’ to critique ‘notions of homogeneity and canonicity’ (Burdett et al., 2020: 232) should always be concerned with how to research multilingual places and identities.
Before I continue, a few caveats become necessary. First of all, my references to ‘the Italian space’ relate not only to the territory of the Italian state, but also to any space that can be recognized as ‘Italian’ through the presence of signs that can be traced to forms of italianità, contested as they may be. This includes, for example, places outside of Italy where material signifiers of the Italian diaspora are to be found (Chianese, 2022); or spaces that intend to signify italianità (such as shops or cultural centres) even if they may end up proposing ‘parochial simplifications of essentialized identities’ (Bartoloni and Ricatti, 2015: 550). It also includes the immaterial space of the internet where new signifiers of italianità are shared and contested at an incredibly rapid pace.
Secondly, in this article, I will not consider the myriad autochthonous dialects and languages that can be found across the Italian space, and which lend their traditions and vitality to an ever-evolving definition of Italian culture (nor do I have the space to explore the age-old, thorny question of what constitutes a dialect and what constitutes a language). Based on my own research experience, I offer a few reflections on the multilingual perspectives of migrants and refugees, and on what Italian studies scholars can do to reflect on migrant identities within the Italian space.
Understanding linguistic diversity in the Italian space
At the start of 2022, 5,193,669 foreign nationals from all over the world were living in Italy according to official statistics (ISTAT, 2022: 175); moreover, independent estimates place residents without a valid permesso di soggiorno at an additional 670,000 (ISPI, 2018). It is nearly impossible to provide a realistic estimate of the number of languages spoken by all these individuals. It is possible to speculate, however, that the numbers above include speakers of hundreds of different languages. Italian-based migrants often come from some of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world, such as India or Nigeria (each of them a home to more than 400 languages; Ethnologue, n.d.). This linguistic diversity represents cultural richness in the countless ways in which languages are used to describe, understand and explain the Italian space; and in the constant mixing of Italian with these languages. Migrants express hope, anger, happiness and fear connected to their Italian experience, through unique combinations of languages that would have never been in contact otherwise. This is a fact of contemporary Italy.
In the process of ‘integrating’ newcomers into the Italian space, however, the assumption is generally that they will learn and use standard forms of Italian. Since 2010, individuals who apply for a long-term permesso di soggiorno are required to pass an Italian language test (Ministero dell’Interno, n.d.). Language courses may be available for newcomers who are judged to be particularly ‘vulnerable’ such as asylum seekers: the provision of such courses has been often at the centre of debate, such as when in 2018 a law decree severely limited the availability of language courses for asylum seekers, as part of a general tightening of asylum norms.
Resources for language teachers and classrooms can be more or less explicitly intended as tools for welcoming the newcomers into the fabric of Italian society – or keeping them out. Language courses and other integration services, on the other hand, are also heavily linked to a specific socio-economic hierarchy, where Italian is necessary to make the newcomer function ‘properly’ in the host society. Research on Italian integration services has explored how standard Italian is related to the creation of ‘commodifiable workers’ capable of using standard forms and desirable jargon (Del Percio, 2018a, 2018b). The assumption, at any rate, is that the teaching of Italian is functional to a view of integration where speaking the local language is the ultimate goal, and ‘those who “fail” to integrate face sanctions, whether the withdrawal of social benefits, services, residency documents, or citizenship entitlements’ (Flubacher and Yeung, 2016: 600).
For those of us who are teachers of Italian, it is our duty to keep in mind the gatekeeping function that language courses and tests may have. Many students of Italian approach the language not as university or high school students, but as individuals for whom Italian proficiency is part of the framework of control that the state exerts over their ‘integration’. They are not drawn to the language by pictures of Venetian canals or Botticelli's Venere in university brochures, but by the need to secure personal safety and better employment. Even the most seemingly ‘innocent’ grammatical rule, such as teaching the correct auxiliary for the passato prossimo of andare, may assume a clearly political dimension when grammatical correctness makes the difference between getting residency or not.
In a reflection on linguistic hospitality based on her experience in the South African context, Cécile Vigouroux (2019: 46) asks ‘What if the nation-state-defined-host would learn the language of the foreigner-guest? How would it reframe each other's positionalities, their respective rights to belong, and the locale they both inhabit?’. She asks this question in relation to a project taking place in a Cape Town township where residents can learn the language of newcomers, in the hope that knowledge may help bridge some gaps and prevent inter-ethnic violence. Such a proposal may not take sufficiently into account the fact that teaching and using a language do not necessarily foster equality and prevent discrimination: indeed, as Blommaert's anecdote above shows, knowledge of a language can also be an instrument of domination. At the same time, one cannot help but reflect about the (little) room given, in the Italian socio-cultural debate, to languages that have been a significant part of the Italian space for decades – Albanian, Romanian, Bangla, Tagalog and others – and wonder what more could be done.
Those who have spent enough time in a language classroom for asylum seekers will have been able to note the extremely complex multilingual repertoires of the newcomers. These repertoires are systematically devalued by virtue of their owners’ lack of proficiency in standard Italian, especially if combined with low literacy (D’Agostino, 2017). If we outgrow any form of fascination with native speaker competence (as a near-unattainable standard that all students should reach to pass exams and/or integrate in society), we can start working with multilingualism in action. At any moment in any given language classroom there is a group of students who are not ‘native speakers’ of the language being taught and who are constantly making comparisons and connections between the language of instruction and their own linguistic repertoire. They notice similarities, marvel at peculiarities, turn up their noses at difficulties, try out new words and expressions on their tongues. Teachers face the choice of judging them for their ‘incomplete’ proficiency in a specific standard of a specific language, or helping them in their lifelong journey as users of language. The latter would imply seeing language not as a noun (someone's birthright and someone else's acquisition), but as a verb: languaging as the ‘process of continuous becoming of ourselves and of our language practices, as we interact and make meaning in the world’ (García and Li, 2014: 8), where teachers act as temporary guides to their students.
Researchers in Italian studies face a similar choice when choosing whether, and how, to incorporate the multilingual reality that makes up the Italian space. This choice does not only concern linguists, but also literary and cultural scholars. Using different types of theoretical and methodological knowledge (from literary criticism to anthropology, from sociolinguistics to education), we can contribute towards a narrative understanding of the multilingual trajectories crossing the Italian space, and of the contested space that such trajectories occupy. This does not only mobilize research skills, but it also helps reframing the researcher's role and responsibility in the conversation on what ultimately constitutes Italian culture.
Thinking multilingually
Recent debates on multilingual identities that are based on the lived experience of language in the social and material context, with an approach to multilingualism that is at once biographical and spatial, lend themselves to interdisciplinary connections that go well beyond the scope of applied linguistics or sociolinguistics. The mosaic of languages and dialects that we speak is not a product of our own place of birth or the country that issued our passport (nor is it in any way our ‘birthright’); it is rather a product of our biographies, and of real-world encounters (Blommaert and Backus, 2013; Busch, 2017; Stevenson, 2017). Brigitta Busch (2017: 349) has argued how ‘the linguistic repertoire develops and changes throughout life in response to needs and challenges we are confronted with’ and to ‘emotionally lived experiences of singular or repeated interactions with others’. Our linguistic repertoire is also an autobiography of how we came to master those particular languages/dialects/registers. In its narrative structure, it takes into account how language use is developed in response to national ideologies, socio-economic inequalities and racio-linguistic constraints (see Rosa and Flores, 2017) that we have encountered in our lives. This type of biographical understanding of how multilingual identities are developed lends itself to a variety of interdisciplinary connections, including inputs from literary scholars who are well versed in thinking narratively and examining how these narratives interconnect with different areas of knowledge.
Understanding language as it evolves in real-world encounters means taking into account the physical, material and even ecological world where individuals develop their linguistic repertoires. Individual repertoires feed into ‘the sedimented language practices of particular places’ (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2014: 180) to create habits, ways of (mis)understanding each other and creative combinations of languages, dialects and styles that ultimately characterize a specific setting. That is what happens for example when, in an Italian refugee reception centre, two Nigerian women use words such as ‘patente’ or ‘questura’ in their Yoruba conversation – before addressing a social worker in an English that, as researchers have noted, is not the same English that the latter may have learned in an Italian school (Guido, 2019). Refugee reception centres are just an example of the multilingual Italian landscapes that are created by the intersection of personal trajectories, where speakers of different languages are simultaneously brought together and placed in a hierarchical relation with each other and the surrounding landscape.
Awareness of the composition of multilingual landscapes is of paramount importance, to protect the dignity and human rights of individuals. This recently became apparent when, during the COVID-19 crisis, Italian health authorities and civil society mobilized networks of intercultural mediators and interpreters to reach multilingual communities and provide potentially life-saving information in languages they could understand (Federici and Ciribuco, in progress), which is a right recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO, 2017).
Researching multilingualism, however, is not only about recognition of multilingual identities and multilingual rights, but also about multilingual creativity. Applied linguists emphasize the creative aspect of everyday multilingual interaction, intended as all language users’ ability to ‘play with various linguistic features’ and playfully bend the social conventions that regulate the use of languages, bringing the new and the unexpected into the world (García and Li, 2014: 32). Socio-linguistic creativity has to do with how language ‘allows us to articulate new ways of being, to share with others our ideas and dreams for an entirely different world’ and ultimately bring about ‘fundamental changes in the socio-cultural and political order’ (Swann and Deumert, 2017: 5). As such, there is room for interdisciplinary connections between the study of literary texts, of artistic production, of the multilingual individuals who dreamed and wrote them into being and the change that they can bring into the world.
In the last decades, in Italy as in many other parts of the world, organizations and institutions have started working collaboratively with artistic practices (theatre, visual arts, creative writing …) in an attempt to foster intercultural communication between migrant and local communities. These activities come with a set of risks and potential issues, ranging from authorship (who has control over the creative output – the participants or the project managers?) to the risk that this type of action might be considered a ‘sufficient’ effort towards ‘integration’, and an excuse not to promote more long-term changes in the lives of participants. Such practices represent, on the other hand, a potential venue for different multilingual inhabitants of a place to contribute, each with their own linguistic repertoire and creative skills, to a shared conversation about community (Evans, 2019; Hirsu, 2020; Phipps and Kay, 2014). From a research standpoint, this type of activity is a very good example of research that can combine input from education, from intercultural communication, from applied linguistics and from literary/theatre/etc. studies, to research the role of multilingual creativity in disrupting or reinforcing relations of power in Italian culture.
In a recent project (Ciribuco, 2022), I worked with a group of asylum seekers who had taken part in Bouge-Toi!, a dance workshop in Perugia where they had worked on developing choreographies as well as video clips based on their dances. These clips are ‘project outputs’ or, at best, proofs of successful integration in the eyes of the institutions who funded the project. They are also proof of a journey that resulted in dance teachers and participants forging bonds, while negotiating across their creative divergences and relations of power. Finally, they are works of art in which participants used their bodies and their linguistic repertoires to reimagine their connections with the Italian space. French, English, Italian and some African languages intersected to showcase the authors’ different and unique perspectives on an Italian city, where they had been brought by the inscrutable machinery of Italian refugee reception services.
In the process of conducting research, while sharing words and coffee with participants/authors and dance teachers, we talked about their linguistic repertoires. The participants/authors guided me through the intricacies of the sociolinguistic landscape in places like Ivory Coast or Cameroon, before telling me how they struggled to learn Italian in a system that limited their occasions for practising the language by confining them in a centro that was a repurposed hotel outside the city. We went through the difficulties, incomprehension and misunderstandings that took place in the dance workshops. And they guided me through their videos, the sometimes very painful stories that they represented and the stylistic strategies that they had adopted to represent them. On one hand, it was a demonstration that dance could help intercultural communication and community bonds by appealing to semiotic resources that are not strictly related to language proficiency – as opposed to, for example, a creative writing workshop (see Chaplin, 2018). This echoes findings reported, for example, by Wells (2018) in her study of how intercultural theatre groups in Bologna create a multilingual space.
At a deeper level, the research taught me much about how a city that I knew well could be completely different, and mean differently, for someone trying to figure out its meaning from the position of a newcomer. As the Bouge-Toi! dancers created paths, learned new words or noticed their lack of words, connected meanings, forged conversations or avoided confrontations, their Perugia was completely different from the one where I had attended university. Far from being a ‘project output’, the works of Bouge-Toi! dancers were re-narrating and re-semiotizicing Perugia. They gave the city meanings I could only do my best to understand, but which were as urgent and valid as my own perspective – the perspective of someone whose status as an Umbrian native is never questioned.
Another recent piece of research, conducted by De Fina and her colleagues (2020), focuses on a storytelling project involving refugee youths in Palermo. The project made use of different techniques of oral creativity, centring around the Odyssey, whose text was translated and re-translated by the participants in a series of encounters that later gave life to other forms of art, such as paintings. The project made use of an established example of what Bakhtin calls the chronotope, a sort of master narrative unfolding through space and time according to certain features that make it recognizable and yet flexible enough to be recontextualized (Bakhtin, 1981). In this case, the master narrative was that of Odysseus the traveller, seeking home in a sea full of perils. This chronotope predictably resonated with young people who had made their own perilous Mediterranean journey, but also with their teachers. It ‘led to a process of identification in which the minors saw themselves as travelers and as strangers rather than as anonymous migrants’ and recognized in themselves ‘values associated with this new figure of the traveler: values of courage and endurance’. At the same time, the process helped teachers see their students in a completely different light (De Fina et al., 2020: 80). In this way, a narrative that, though not Italian per se, has influenced countless elements of Italian culture could be made anew by a collective and subversive act of translation that gave the narrative a new meaning.
Conclusion: Future directions
The realm of the multilingual and of the transnational is the realm of the unexpected, providing new descriptions and images that have the potential to continuously re-make the representation of the Italian space. This is a process that needs adequate resources, time, effort and recognition. Researchers in Italian studies have a role to play in that process: on a certain level, our work can pick up perspectives on Italy, and evaluate initiatives, that in turn can influence institutions to act and provide resources for inclusive initiatives. This type of work, however (conducted through interviews, observation, etc.), is always our own side of the conversation. It stems from our status – which may be that of ‘native speakers’, and/or of Italian citizens and/or of members of highly prestigious institutions. This status often comes with our own ignorance of the very perspectives that we wish to include in our work. In the presence of speakers of languages like Bassa or Malenke, I could often only take a step back, accept that everyone is an expert of their own linguistic repertoire and analyse (as honestly as I could) how their repertoires interacted with the language named in my job title.
Providing only my side of the conversation, while acknowledging my own limitations, may not always be enough. New methods are developing in sociolinguistics that I hope to use in future research. Some scholars for example theorize that, if there is a citizen science that makes use of the community's knowledge to co-create scientific knowledge, we could also harness the power of ‘citizen sociolinguistics’ (Svendsen, 2018; Svendsen and Goodchild, 2023, forthcoming). What if the individuals that we contact could have a role in designing our research questions, by pointing out what we are missing about the socio-cultural reality that we wish to describe? What if research participants could be given control of their own research projects within bigger projects?1
From the perspective of cultural production and the creative arts, the answer may lie in co-creation. It may lie in the co-design of creative and artistic practices that can harness individuals’ creative potential. The researcher could provide participants with practical means to express their creativity, and accept that a good part of the research outputs will be reserved to the voices of the participants/authors. This is a relatively simple way of using our platform to bring different perspectives into the conversation.
Learning to analyse cultural phenomena is a lifelong journey that we take while Italian culture evolves as a transnational conversation, outside our control. While Italy's transnational connections develop in an age of mobility and interconnectedness, tracing multilingual paths over the surface of the Italian space, we have a responsibility to marvel at the multilingual reality of that space; and turn that marvel into action.
