In this article I adopt a family language policy approach and a diachronic perspective to explore how the dialect-Italian dynamics unfolds differently within different cohorts of Italian migrants due to the hierarchical position of the two heritage languages. I highlight three main issues that emerge across time in the language policies in the…

The relationship between the polite and conventional nature of friendly language and the sincerity of the writer's feelings is a central topic in linguistic and historical research on friendship in epistolary communication. This relationship can be understood in the context of the emotional values and conventionalised emotional practices that…

In this paper we draw attention to people who journey from one temporal and spatial setting towards another in the 'South', who aspire to a reconfigured sense of belonging, prosperity and wellbeing, and their multilinguality and multilingualisms. Through three vignettes of journeys we illustrate how in changing of place that linguistic diversities…

This article presents the findings of an online survey conducted amongst bi- (English, Italian) and trilingual (English, Italian and dialect) Italo-Australian youth, exploring self-assessed language competence, self-reported language choice in various communicative situations, and attitudes towards heritage languages. These young people appear…

This article explores attitudes and response to language selection in advertising targeting Italian bilinguals who belong to a defined speech community. The research builds upon (i) research on multilingual advertising by investigating its attitudinal correlates, and (ii) studies on advertising to bilinguals through the verification of the…

Australian research on immigrant languages has paid little attention to interactional approaches to language alternation as identity construction, and sites other than the family and the mainstream school. We argue for the need of studies that take into account a wider range of sites, in particular "community" sites, and adopt…

This study explores whether chat users are able to extend prior, apparently completed posts in the dyadic online text chat context. Dyadic text chat has a unique turn-taking system, and most chat softwares do not permit users to monitor one another's written messages-in-progress. This is likely to impact on their use of online extensions as an…

This study outlines a linguistic profile of two subgroups of Italian English circumstantial bilinguals - one dominant in English and the other dominant in Italian--by exploring for the first time their linguistic repertoire through the Gradient Bilingual Dominance Scale (Dunn & Fox Tree, 2009). The scale takes into account language…

This book is a timely comparison of the divergent worlds of policy implementation and policy ambition, the messy, often contradictory here-and-now reality of languages in schools and the sharp-edged, shiny, future-oriented representation of languages in policy. Two deep rooted tendencies in Australian political and social life, multiculturalism…

Examines Australian Italian and some characteristics that distinguish it from standard Italian, and discusses the problem of which to teach in the schools. (EKN)

Presents data on patterns of language use by Italians living in Australia, focusing on the maintenance of Italian and Dialect under the impact of widespread shift to English. Data from self-report surveys suggest differences by gender, age, and region of origin and note that the position of Italian, though more limited, is somewhat more solid than…

First results of a survey of English use in 202 Italo-Australian subjects in 46 situations show a widespread shift to English, beginning with younger (first generation) subjects and increasing dramatically among members of the second generation. Italo-Australians' English usage depends more on personal characteristics of speakers than on topic or…

This article reports on an investigation into the loss of morphology expressing temporality in the Italian of second generation Italo-Australians. The purpose of the study is to verify whether the loss of Italian tense and aspect morphology proceeds from marked to unmarked, where markedness is defined on the basis of formal and semantic criteria.…

This paper deals with the author's recent work on political, sociolinguistic and educational aspects of bilingual and immersion education in Australia. Among the cases considered are: the development of a professional position statement on bilingual and immersion education, to be disseminated to policy makers; advising on an Auslan (Australian…

Although the Italian system of address pronouns is relatively complex, scant attention is paid to the issue in L2 manuals designed for English-speaking learners of Italian. After showing that Italian L2 manuals are not necessarily accurate in the limited detail they provide, we examine specifically the frequent claim that so-called informal…