Nancy C. Carnevale (Montclair State University)

The history of language in the lives of Italian immigrants and their descendants in the US is rooted in Italy’s particular linguistic past. The Italian peninsula was home to numerous dialects that could vary widely from each other. Communication was a longstanding problem. With Italy only becoming a nation-state in 1861, the impetus towards a common language was significantly delayed. “La questione della lingua” was only partially resolved in the 1880s when 14^th century vernacular Florentine, the language of Dante’s Divine Comedy, became the standard. In practice, however, only a small percentage of the population of the newly created Italian nation-state spoke the language. While the Italian language and the dialects all derived directly from Latin, the idea that dialects are corruptions of “real” Italian contributed to their devaluation. Yet dialect usage was more common than not. Only in the 1950s did a popularized Italian begin to come into greater use as opportunities for schooling improved and radio and television brought the language into the home.

In the decades leading up to unification, the South came to be seen as separate from and inferior to the North. While the South suffered from greater poverty, illiteracy, and more, many located the source of these problems in Southerners themselves rather than in the political and social situation. Although dialect use throughout Italy has been viewed negatively by Italians, the pejorative view of Southerners who were the bulk of immigrants to the US during the era of mass migration further contributed to the stigmatization of their dialects.

This negative perception of the South was reinforced by the rise of the field of “criminal anthropology” in the 1880s which contended that Southern Italians were more prone to violent crimes than Northerners, further impugning southern dialects. These views meshed with notions of racial hierarchy prevalent in the US that contributed to Southern Italians being placed near the bottom of that ladder. Their arrival also coincided with a powerful nativist reaction against the newly arriving Europeans and their languages.

While English language acquisition by immigrants was delayed, sometimes indefinitely, like other immigrant groups before and since, Italian immigrants dealt with the problem of communication with other dialect speakers through the creation of a hybrid form of speech. This Italian American idiom was primarily a fusion of English and dialect (often Neapolitan which was understood by many Southerners). Essentially Italian in terms of structure and pronunciation, it became more Americanized over time. Many variations existed based, for example, on the region of Italy from which the migrants came as well as their place of settlement in the US. Even though it lacked consistency, variations of the idiom were widely recognized and used by post-war immigrants as well. As was the case with other groups, the children of Italian immigrants often understood their parents’ dialect and hybrid speech but spoke to them in English.

The historical moment informed the experiences of language for the migrants. The World War I years ushered in an era of 100% Americanism or unhyphenated Americanism that required immigrants to demonstrate their allegiance to their new country in large part by shedding all vestiges of their pre-migration cultures, including language. Although many immigrants claim that their names were Anglicized by immigration officials at Ellis Island, name changes were more likely the result of encounters with teachers and other authority figures or of personal choice in an effort to fit in. A pillar of the Americanization movement that extended into the 1920s was that the ability to speak English was a defining characteristic of a “real” American. In the confused logic of the time, learning English could transform racially ambiguous immigrants into intelligent, fully white Americans. Yet, for various reasons, Southern Italians had low rates of English language acquisition.

Even so, Italian immigrants produced literature in English as well as in dialect, Italian and Italglish. They also had access to a vibrant Italian language press. The variety performer, Eduardo Migliaccio who went by the stage name, Farfariello (1892-1946), presented character sketches of neighborhood types for appreciative audiences of Italian immigrants in the Italo-American idiom and in dialect.

Language use and attitudes about language on the part of the Italian immigrants and their descendants were most deeply affected by World War II. With the United States at war with Italy, Italian nationals were declared “enemy aliens” and forced to register with the government. Throughout the country, restrictions were placed on them, and a few hundred were interned. In parts of coastal California, thousands were relocated. Italian language use aroused suspicion from the authorities as well as from the general public. Although the Italian language was not proscribed, Italian radio broadcasts and newspapers declined. The heightened suspicion of Italians created anxiety about the use of the language even in private and by American citizens of Italian descent. Many second-generation Italian Americans cite the war years as the time their families stopped speaking Italian/dialect even as the war ultimately led to greater acceptance of Italian Americans.

Unlike other parts of the Anglophone world, the US has not encouraged the maintenance of immigrant languages. The number and diversity of southern dialects that the immigrants brought with them mitigated against the “maintenance” of the standard. Nor has there been sufficient institutional support for Italian in public elementary or secondary schools. Italian in all of its forms continues to decline in the United States, reflecting a common pattern of language loss in the United States along with the much smaller number of new migrants from Italy. Little remains of the Italian language press. While one can still hear the Italo-American idiom among populations of older Italian immigrants, more widely heard today, especially in the Northeast, are “Italian Americanisms;” Southern Italian in pronunciation, with Americanized phonetic spellings of Southern Italian words, often food terms. Still, sociolinguists have found that Italian American identity continues to be transmitted even in the absence of fluency in Italian.

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