Emigrazione e bilinguismo. Realtà russofone a confronto

Abstract

Monica Perotto, Carlo Ambrosi

Russian Emigration and Bilingualism

The present article compares two different sociolinguistic patterns of Russian emigrants of the last wave in the USA and in Italy. The New York suburb of Brighton Beach presents a typical post-Soviet community confi guration, where Russian language plays an important role of lingua franca, though it is differently realized at the diastratic level. Inside this emigration group it is possible to identify different linguistic attitudes towards Russian language between the elderly immigrants on one hand and the young ones on the other. The former are mostly monolingual and prefer to use Russian in all communication domains, the latter are bilingual with the dominance of English language and a wide use of code switching and code mixing. The Italian context is not so openly polarized, because of the dominance of Italian language, which prevails in almost all social life domains. Despite the fact that Russian speaking people living in Italy do not form a typical community, they show great interest in the mantainance of their mother tongue and of their original identity.