The Tunisian community of Mazara del Vallo (Sicily) | SOAS University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2018-01-26

This seminar titled "The Tunisian community of Mazara del Vallo (Sicily): Issues in language contact, change and identity" was given by Luca D’Anna (Mississippi) at the Department of Linguistics, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics on 9 January 2018.

You can find out more about this event at: https://goo.gl/QNiKzC

The study of Arabic-speaking communities in the diaspora has attracted, in the last decades, great interest among scholars, resulting in a number of contributions that shed light on interesting phenomena of language contact, language erosion and the interplay between language and identity. The two volumes edited by Aleya Rouchdy (1992, 2002) and the collection of essays on Arabic as a minority language (Owens 2000) paved the way to several more studies that give us a clear idea of Arabic-speaking communities in Northern Europe and the US. Italy, on the other hand, has been traditionally neglected by scholars studying Arabic in the diaspora, although the number of Arabic speakers has been on the rise for the last few decades.

The present talk will first describe the Tunisian community of Mazara del Vallo (Sicily), the oldest Arabic-speaking community in Italy. The existence of this community, mainly composed of fishermen coming from the Tunisian Sahel (mainly Mahdia and Chebba), is originally due to the availability of jobs in the fishing sector. In Mazara del Vallo, the Tunisian immigrants settled in old historical centre, built by the Arabs in the Middle Ages, creating a close-knit community whose ethnolinguistic vitality allowed the preservation of Arabic until the 3rd generation, contrarily to what we observe in other diasporic communities (Canagarajah 2008).

The talk will then illustrate on the phenomena of language contact observed within the community, with a particular focus on interference, borrowing, codeswitching and morphological hybrids. The final part will be devoted to the analysis of identity practices and polylanguaging among young speakers, with an emphasis on the creative employment of their complex linguistic repertoire in the social media.