 Rwy'n meddwl i chi, wrth gwrs. Rwy'n meddwl i chi, wrth gwrs, am ystod y ffyrdd Llywodraeth Cymru yw 2018. Rwy'n meddwl i chi'n gwybod i chi, Dr Llywodraeth Daniland, ddwy'r Unedigol. Llywodraeth gynnyddol i'r Llywodraeth Cymru. ..and hyd wedi'i ei ddweud o'r cynllun i unig oedd y Unedig Ffordd. Dyma'r unidol yn gyntaf i Saouas a hwnna'n ddweud o'r unig o'r Maesol. Hwnna'n wedi'u ei ddweud o'r Davyll yn Llywodraeth Cymru yn 2014. A dyma'n dweud y 25, mae'n profesor yr unidol ar y Unedig Ffordd. Ulwca is a dialectologist and Historical English and He's worked mainly on chengizian and livian Arabic dialect and covered topics such as politeness, modality, language, and identity, and also does a very interesting work on Arabic in diaspora a we're going to be hearing about some of our work today. So, Luca, please. Good afternoon, everybody, and I'm grateful to Chris for inviting me. And in case you're wondering, my accent is the most unlikely combination of a native Italian accent plus a deep southern accent because I've been living for the last three years in Mississippi, so I know it's not the... I apologize in advance. So, and today I would like to share with you some of my research concerning the Arabic and Italian diaspora, which is an understudied topic, and in particular about the community, transnational community of Mazara del Vallo, which is a small fishing town in Sicily and southern Italy. I will give you the details. So, as you can see, Mazara del Vallo is the closest town, the closest Italian town to Tunisia, is just 100 miles from Tunisia, and the Tunisian community of Mazara is the oldest Tunisian community and Arab community in Italy. It's been there since the end of the 60s, and it's been there. It's the history of this community as a sort of an incident and the history of the Arab diaspora in Italy and in Western Europe because in the wake of the colonization process, the Arab immigration toward Western Europe was mainly addressed toward great towns which offered job opportunities to the immigrants, and Mazara del Vallo is a very small town in southern Italy, which is itself at the center of the process of immigration, so it's been hit very hardly by financial and economical crisis. So it's very strange that it came to host one of the biggest and oldest Tunisian communities in Italy, and that happened because at the end of the 60s with the Italian economic boom, basically the younger generations at a certain point refused to take their father's places in the more traditional jobs such as fishing, and they pushed it for higher education and better paid government jobs. So what happened was that there were vacancies in the fishing sector that were filled with immigrant labor. An Italian community had been living in Tunis in the neighborhood of La Goulette for decades until the end of the French administration, so there is this sort of, we don't know if it's history or legend in Mazara that the first Tunisians were called by the last Italians who left Tunisia to go back to Italy. And most of the immigrants were fishermen, and today this community represents to me a very interesting case study because it shows trends that differ substantially from what we see usually in other diasporia communities in Western Europe and in the US. So I will, this is Mazara del Vallo, so it's a very pretty town, and this spot here is the place in which the Arabs came ashore in 827, when they started the Arab Islamic conquest of Sicily. So it's peculiar, but Mazara del Vallo was the first town conquered by the Arabs in the middle age when they conquered Sicily, and the historical center of Mazara del Vallo still bears the marks of this Arab heritage. If you wander through the streets, it is very reminiscent of the North African Medina. So when the immigrants arrived in 1968, there was the year of a tremendous earthquake that shook this part of Sicily, so most of the houses in the historical center and the historical center were damaged by the earthquake. The Italians were starting to leave, so they found a way to gain something out of their houses by renting them to the immigrants, which created a sort of ghetto in the historical center which was avoided by the Italians for at least 30 years. So the Italians left their historical center of their town and they left it to the Tunisians, who created a close-knit community in what was dubbed later by the Italians the Casbah, because it was so reminiscent of a North African Medina that they disowned this neighborhood. The existence of a close-knit community and one neighborhood that was, I will let you see the neighborhood later, that was very reminiscent of a North African neighborhood created some language trends and processes that are worth investigating and to my surprise, when I started this research in 2016, there was basically nothing that had been written on the community of Mazara del Vallo. So during summer 2016 and then during the subsequent winter break, I conducted social linguistic interviews in Mazara del Vallo with the Zoom H4N using both questionnaire and non-structured conversation. The interviews were then transcribed and coded as far as the analysis of the variants was concerned and I used both a qualitative and quantitative approach in analyzing the data. The range of phenomena that resulted from this research is so wide that it is impossible to cover in a single lecture. So dissemination of results included a book that was just published and some papers. The book is in Italian, the papers are all in English and they are all in different stages of completion. Some of them have been accepted and are impressed, some of them have just been submitted, some of them are in progress. So today I'm going to talk with you about, I will try to trace briefly a social linguistic profile of the community. Then I will spend some time talking of inter-dialect development and contact between the different varieties of Arabic spoken in Mazara del Vallo, the different varieties of Tunisian Arabic and what happens to them. Then I will go to language contact between Arabic, Italian and Sicilian with, of course, code switching and if I manage to keep it within the 45 minutes, some issues of identity that I find particularly interesting. I will first give you some background of what usually happens to Arabic communities in the diaspora. We have the so-called law of the three generations according to which the first generation start experiencing language erosion. The second generation experiences sometimes partial, sometimes total loss of active competence in the heritage language and in the third generation we have the total loss of the active competence and the severe loss of passive competence in the heritage language. So we have different descriptions. We have Buman and Derwyr. They write about Moroccan communities in Western Europe and the Netherlands and Dahar writes about Lebanese community in the US. So there is an almost total shift to English or to the socially dominant language starting from the second generation. Usually third generation speakers are not able to communicate in the heritage language and their knowledge is reduced to a set of idiomatic expressions and of vague cultural identities. If we go to Maseradolba, a lot of the main trends are that not only is Arabic active competence in Arabic preserved by second generation speakers, but the large majority of my second generation speakers were dominant in Arabic. So their first language, even when they grow up and they complete their education in Italy it's still Arabic and active competence is preserved at least until the third generation. The third generation is just coming of age now. So I didn't have enough speakers to describe the third generation in detail but the interviews that I conducted with third generation speakers were conducted in Arabic and I was speaking to them in my Libyan variety of Arabic and they were able to understand and to speak back in their Tunisian variety of Arabic. So there was also some mental linguistic competence in those speakers. Of course, the first question that was partially answered by my introduction was why this happens in Maseradolba, why there is this very different trend. So I resorted to the Ethnolinguistic Vitality framework in its 1977 version and the 2015 enhanced version with the psychological vitality that was described by Ehala. And basically there are three factors that shape the Ethnolinguistic Vitality of a community. The first one is status, so the social prestige of the community. The second is institutional support. And the third one is demography. As far as the status is concerned, as you may imagine, we are speaking of a community of fishermen that were just brought to Italy to fill vacancies in the fishing sector and who were not considered as welcome in Italy because the labour unions were afraid that they would destroy the job market by accepting any kind of low wage that they would be offered, which sometimes happened. So the status is quite low. Institutional support, both formal and informal, is mediocre. It's mediocre to good. In Italy there is no hostile policy against the use of Arabic or the government is not doing anything to try to integrate linguistically the minorities. They are left to themselves with some interesting phenomena that arise from time to time. For example, in 1981, in the wake of what we call the discussed literature concerning Masrada Al-Ballod calls the illusion of return. So 12 years after the immigrants arrived, they asked and obtained from the Tunisian government the opening of an exclusively Tunisian school in Masrada Al-Ballod. So at the heart of the Tunisian neighbourhood, if we may call it the Tunisian neighbourhood, a Tunisian school was open, which was not a Sunday school or an ethnic school, it was an official branch of a school in Tunis in which an exclusively monolingual curriculum in Arabic was taught and in which Italian was not even taught as a second language. So the second language was French, Italian had no place in the curriculum so the immigrants managed to overcome one of the main difficulties of the diasporate communities in getting formal education in the heritage language at the expense of the socially dominant language so that we may find people in their 30s born and raised in Masrada Al-Ballod whose Italian is still clearly as a very heavy accent and is not grammatically correct. It's clearly a second and out to Italian. Not only because they lacked formal education in Italian but also because this school was located and is still located at the centre of the Arab-speaking neighbourhood so that the young speakers didn't have to leave the neighbourhood and they spent their entire childhood in a neighbourhood in which the percentage of Tunisians ranged from 30% in the outer areas to 70% in the inner areas so that the dominant position of Italian within the neighbourhood is dubious to say the list. And if you take into consideration this picture so we have not only the school but also Tunisian coffee shops we have the mosque, the Italian government gave them permission to perform the adhan so that in Masrada it's customary to hear the adhan. If you're in Masrada, even your radio will not... If you turn on the radio you will listen to Tunisian music because it's so close that you feel like you're no longer in Sicily and you're stepping into Tunisia. And these are some pictures from the neighbourhood and if you've been anywhere in North Africa you will recognise that from a visual perspective it is very reminiscent of North African Medina and those structures there are like from the 9th century so they are 12th centuries old. So what happens in this situation is that Arabic is not confined to the home Arabic is spoken in the Qasbah and different varieties of Arabic are spoken in the Qasbah which leads to interesting processes of dialect levelling which is not usually observed in the diaspora because usually speakers, second generation speakers do not use Arabic outside their house so they learn Arabic from their parents they use it as it is with their parents and outside they will use the socially dominant language. In Masrada Arabic has a wide currency so inter-dialect levelling and accommodation and other interesting development occurred also because another interesting peculiarity of the Tunisian community is that 95% of the Tunisians living in Masrada d-Vallu come from two neighbouring towns in the Tunisian coast Mahdiya and Sheba those dialects are really close and they are separated by two clearly identifiable isoglosses among the others of course there are differences in the realisation of vowels but two of the most studied isoglosses and Arabic dialectology are there in the dialects of Mahdiya and Sheba and they give us a very easy way to study inter-dialect development so the overall applause of Q is realised as a voiceless realisation in Mahdiya and a voiced realisation in Sheba and I forgot to mention that speakers from Mahdiya make up 80% of the community while speakers from Sheba make up the remaining 15% and the 5% that remains is made up of people from like all Tunisia basically so we have a majority and a minority community this is the realisation of the overall applause and then we have the set of the three interdentals Tha, Tha and Vo which are preserved in Sheba and merged with the corresponding applause in Mahdiya which is strange because Tunisian dialects are usually very conservative and they tend to preserve the interdentals even in urban varieties in northern Africa so given this very sketchy idea of how those dialects differ my case study was taking 10 speakers from Sheba first and second generations plus one speaker which I called Old Female Speaker Zero because she is not from Masara del Baldo she just moved to Masara 10 days before I interviewed her so she lost her husband and just joined her son in Masara del Baldo and I knew her son and had the opportunity to interview her before any kind of levelling or erosion happened and then I interviewed 10 speakers five first generation speakers and five second generation speakers and I tried to understand what was going on there so what we find is that usually we don't expect this kind of variation in monolingual speakers that come from that are not from a diasporic context so if we listen to this first audio file it's clear mute, I don't know how to okay so he says you find it, it happens but not so much just for the people who are living in Tunisia so we have and in the same sentence from the same speaker in the same sentence and this is not just one occurrence it's basically it's basically what happens with all speakers so for example you find it that it has not started with the voice realisation with the voice realisation so this is not what we expect from monolingual speakers and in fact when I checked what happens with all female speakers 0 I realized that the voice realisation occurs 93% of the times against meager 6% and in this 93% in this 6% or 7% I took into consideration also items such as Quran, Taqaleed, Alaqa which are long words from classical or modern standard Arabic and for which a voiceless realisation is expected if we take away this lexical items in which actually no variation occurs what we have is basically 100% so a monolingual speaker from the original town from Sheba will realise the voice variant all the times basically what happens in our community is that from the first to the second generation with a single exception here all female speaker 1 we have our most conservative speaker will realise the voice realisation the voice variant 98% of the time and at the other extreme we have young female speaker 2 who is just 17 and who switched completely to the voiceless realisation so the variable is not stable across generations there is also probably some gender variation here involved but they didn't have enough speakers to take this into consideration as well but it's clear that first generation speakers are preserving to a different extent the voice realisation second generation speakers are gradually switching to the voiceless realisation which is the majority community variant if we go to the interdentals they are preserved by all female speaker 0 and they are also preserved this table is very difficult to read but if you take this row into consideration you will see that the interdentals are stable across generations they are preserved by first and second generation speakers alike so that in brief what we have taken into consideration two variables is that we have variation which seems to increase in second generation speakers as far as the overall applause is concerned which becomes while there is little or no variation with the interdentals and the variables here are stable across generations so my question is where of course what is happening, how and why and after consulting with an am and some more experienced social linguists I resorted to the works of Tragil who describes a new dialect formation and the formation of colonial Englishes in New Zealand and other parts of the globe so these six stages can be summarised in three stages so when different varieties of the same language or at least mutually intelligible varieties of the same language what we call dialects come into contact in a place, in a given place three stages that might result in the formation of a new dialect the first stage is that of rudimentary levelling and interdialect development it usually corresponds to the first generation in the second generation we have apparent levelling and variability intra-individual and inter-individual variability while we have focusing and the creation, the formation of the actual new dialect in the third generation so of course he's speaking of something else of the formation of colonial Englishes of a socially dominant elite that moved to a faraway land with limited possibilities of contact with the homeland so this paradigm is not really available to be applied to our situation but it gives us an idea of what is happening so in first generation speakers we have a case of rudimentary levelling clearly in Tunisia and Arabic co and gu are present in basically all the varieties so even varieties that are characterised by a voice realisation have a set of lexical items that are realised with a voiceless realisation and vice versa varieties with a voiceless realisation have a set of lexical items that are realised with a voiceless one so there is here a merger by transfer speakers are taking lexical items from what we call the clilist so the list of the lexical items realised with a voiceless variant and taking them into the list of words realised with a voiced variant or in our case the opposite is happening so those speakers had a very long list of gu items items that were realised with a voiced variant and they are just moving them to the other list to the ones minority list so we can and we will not enter into the details here we can speak of lockup speakers caraya speakers and qabala speakers I dub those speakers in this way which means that we have speakers in which only very formal terms such as lockup surname are realised with a voiceless realisation which is a native like realisation we have caraya speakers which means speakers who started using the voiceless realisation also for terms that are pertaining to more formal registers which would not happen in a native variety in Tripoli and Libya we would have caraya and not caraya for instance but these speakers are starting to use the voiceless variety which is felt as standard like and it's the variant of the majority community in terms pertaining to formal registers and finally we have qabala speakers qabala men's before so speakers were started using the q variant also for adverbs and prepositions and everyday terms which means that the shift from g to q is complete in the second generation what we have is apparent levelling so what we see is basically the same thing speakers that there is variation in speakers between q and g but the levelling here is apparent because those speakers were born and raised in a situation in which the levelling had been going on for decades for two or three decades so they were experiencing a linguistic reality in which the two variants were present and they tried to make sense of the linguistic variety surrounding them in the best way they could the situation is in very different circumstances as described as chaotic by Tragil for New Zealand by Alwer for the dialect of Amman the dialect of the second generation is probably the most chaotic because there is variation to an extent that it's hardly imaginable for example we have here it's a very long excerpt and we'll probably just focus on the items and bold we have the same root qra, ia, qra, ia, qra to study and qarra i garrri or qarra i garrri to teach the same speaker and the same sentence keep switching between q and q all the time so we have and then and then she switches again and the excerpt was actually very long so we have this kind of intra-individual variation which speakers just keep switching from one variant to the other without a clear pattern and if we speak of inter-individual variation we have two speakers here born and raised in the same neighbourhood they have just a couple of meters away from each other the age difference is not that big but we have here preservation of the voice variant and 54% of the occurrences while young female speaker to completely switch to the voiceless variety and the same happens with the interdentals so we have interdentals clearly preserved by adult female speaker 3 and a partial switch for the th and a total switch for the and young female speaker 2 so we have this very chaotic situation and of course the question here right is why the plosive and not the interdentals why is the ovular plosive marked by such great variation while the interdentals are preserved and here there are probably there is probably more than one factor might be salience and especially in the phase of rudimentary levelling the traits that are usually levelled out are traits that are perceived by the speakers as distinguishing their dialect while traits that are not perceived are usually let aside and they don't experience this kind of levelling so after I realized what was going on I started at the end of the interviews to avoid influencing my speakers to ask them what is the difference between your dialect when I was speaking to the speakers from Sheba what is the difference between your dialect and the dialect of Mahdiah and all the answers I got was were of this type ma'nnais let's see if we can listen to it so there is it's all the same but there is only a little difference there is speaking with qa and Sheba also have a verb to mean speaking with the qa so here he says there is only one thing which means they speak with the qa no mention of the interdentals was ever made even though to my to the dialectologist the lack of interdentals in Mahdiah is particularly evident but since this is not perceived by speakers they don't levelled out and the lack of interdentals in Mahdiah is a very peculiar thing in the context of Tunisian dialects which may also help so minority variants if they are unmarked such as interdentals in Tunisian Arabic have a higher chance to survive so at this point we have spoken about the first stage the rudimentary levelling the second stage a parent levelling and variation the third phase the third stage would be focusing on the birth of an extra territorial variety Tunisian dialect of Mazara but will this dialect be born someday I don't know because there are different factors that to me hinder the possibility of the formation of a new dialect first of all all my speakers were spending at least one month a year in Tunisia in their hometown which counterbalances the language erosion and the levelling that they experience in Mazara del Vallo second the demographic balance of Mazara del Vallo is altered in a way which helps preserving Arabic but which hinders the formation of a new dialect because young adult speakers bilingual speakers leave Mazara del Vallo to go and look for jobs in Northern Italy or in Northern Europe and those remain when they marry women from Tunisia they think that Tunisian women in Mazara are too westernized so they go back to Tunisia and they marry women from Tunisia and they bring them to Mazara del Vallo which means that new first generation speakers are constantly added to the small neighbourhood which keeps Arabic alive but of course they will not teach their children a second or a third generation Tunisian variety which has undergone the kind of levelling that we just described so I had a lot of speakers were like third generation speakers from their father's side but second generation speakers from their mother's side because their mother had come from Tunisia a couple of years before they were born and third the process of erosion is slow but it's happening so at a certain point the community will switch to Italian so I know if this kind of development will take place if we will have Tunisian dialect of Mazara and I think that research in the next 10 years is vital to analyze the trends of the community so going to language contact of course in this case the range of phenomena is very wide of course interference on the phonetic morphological synthetic level we have hybridization we have code switching and I will just speak of hybridization and then move to code switching apart from collecting interviews I was monitoring the facebook profiles of some of my speakers and this is what at a certain point this is what happened and one of those profiles one of the speakers says can be translated as cool bro and the other and we are saying ham di cedru ham di cedru is clearly the Arabic name ham with the Sicilian diminutive morpheme edru so it's little little Ahmed or and again so this was not an isolated occurrence we had a kebedri it's a mixture of Italian and Sicilian how cool these guys are I'm sorry for the typo and the other one says tanks safwan i cedru again with safwan Arabic and edru which is the diminutive the Sicilian diminutive morpheme so this kind of hybridization is happening is interesting in its own respect now it's in a very peripheral area of lexicon so nouns I have not I have not instances of like chub di cedru for a little piece of bread or something like that so we cannot today speak of morpheme induction it's something that maybe goes in that direction which is interesting because morpheme induction with the same morpheme already happened in Andalusia arabic Andalusia arabic borrowed four or five morphemes from the romance varieties spoken in the Iberian peninsula and one of them was el coming from the Latin elum which is a thymologically cognate to the Sicilian edru it's basically the same morpheme so young Tunisians in Mazar del Bal they are replicating or doing something which is very similar to what already happened in Andalus 12 centuries ago so they are borrowing a morpheme that was already borrowed in another variety of arabic in contact with a variety of romance centuries ago and speaking of Andalusia arabic something which is interesting in my opinion is that Andalusia arabic also borrowed the augmentative on from romance and it was the morpheme was stable in Andalusia and was then passed to Moroccan arabic and from there it made its way to Tunisia to the dialect of Sheba and Mazzara and then was brought back to Italy by the immigrants so this is a facebook post addressed to my son by one of my informants saying the very cute and the very little and very cute Alessandro so basically we have today two romance morphemes in the arabic spoken in Mazzara one is a stable morpheme is Un and is an augmentative and was borrowed in Andalus in the Beren Peninsula during the Middle Ages another is not yet stable it's maybe on the way of being fully acquired by the varieties of Tunisian arabic spoken in Mazzara but we can have a glimpse this is one of the reasons why it is important and interesting to analyse diasporate communities because we have a glimpse of what might have happened and like older times I never heard any of my speakers saying is just in a playful mode on facebook where language is more relaxed and where the use of polylanguaging and like very creative and a very creative use of the language is the norm rather than the exception and then another interesting phenomenon is of course code switching and I know there is a very literature on code switching in arabic is impressive I will just give you an idea of what happens across the generations I use the matrix language framework so when two languages are used in the same complementiser node or in the same phrase or sentence the way you want one provides the grammatical morphemes and the other provides the lexical morphemes so one provides the other provides words like very briefly put the two languages which are usually arabic and italian are still clearly identifiable and so is the matrix language the matrix language is arabic and we have just switches limited to single lexical items I don't love this area because this area was dangerous this is a textbook example of code switching enrich the switch as a the node between the copula and the attribute if we go to second generations first of all we see that often we don't have two but three codes italian, arabic and french so this is a perfectly bilingual speaker which is here using arabic, italian so we have some samples of code switching where italian is the dominant language some others in which arabic is the dominant language while french is not at the same level it's relegated to the role of extra phrasal tags to me the use of french and this young educated Tunisians signals sub identity within the Tunisian identity so it's a clear indicator of urban social identity through the use of french and so we have three codes we can have four when those speakers use English and they want to use it and we have languages coming closer contact with switches that happen in areas in which usually switching is not allowed or is more rarely allowed for example at the node between the noun and the attributive adjective so here the switch is between Lugha language and Straniera and this kind of switch we have for example Buman and the Reuter that analyze code switching between Moroccan and Dutch and the Moroccan diaspora in the right that this kind of switch is rarely allowed and bilingual speakers is very frequent and it is the same with the switch between the modal verb and the main verb we have here so she says I was asking her about the preservation of Arabic and she said it depends on the parents if from childhood they make their children speak Arabic or if they let them lose themselves so the modal Arabic requires a verb in the prefix of conjugation imperfective after it and this verb is provided by Italian but is conjugated in accordance with the syntax of Arabic not of Italian because in Italian that would require a verb in the infinitive but at a certain point the same speaker switches to a mix matrix language expression thing so she says my parents this can also be a good thing that they let me integrate with Italians in this case the modal verb is in Arabic conjugated in Arabic and the verb is in the Italian infinitive while the Arabic modal requires a verb in the prefix of conjugation so we don't know which we cannot identify here the matrix language with Arabic nor with Italian because both the languages are providing grammar at the same time in this note in this phrase so we have a mix matrix language in speakers that are perfectly bilingual and the same happens for example here so so I was asking him whether it is important to know Arabic and say I asked and he said I can know that's not very native like which is Italian my language but Italian here requires the definite article the my language which is of course an allowed in English and it is not allowed in Arabic and the absence of the definite article here in a speaker that is fully bilingual as an eight year old child is clearly motivated, is a third generation speaker is clearly motivated by the fact that here the position of the possessive is clearly due to Italian because Arabic would have lingua mia with the possessive postpone to the noun but the absence of the definite article is dictated by the syntax of Arabic so once again we have a mix matrix language here because and I think in this case the sentence is not well formed in either of the two languages so we have an attempt at a mix matrix language while here the sentence and the phrase was respecting the grammars of both the languages at the same time so if you listen again he says so it's not pronouncing the it doesn't say so third generation speakers are starting to experience a stronger language erosion with the loss of market phonemes in this case I don't think at this interference, phonetic interference from Italian we don't need, we should have to motivate this kind of interference what I think is that we have a weakened monitoring so the chain of transmission of the language is not broken but it's weakened so some developmental forms, forms that are typical of the first stages of language acquisition and that appear and then disappear and young monolingual speakers are here allowed to spread and to survive into the speech of older speakers so that for instance we have, this is the etymological form il qe nhal wledd in Tunisian Arabic he found bees and boy and in Maseradolbala we now have stably in second generation speakers the forms qe instead of il qe hal instead of nhal and lidd with a compensatory liddha sometimes instead of wledd so in Magribi Arabic not sure vowels are allowed in open and stressed syllable so that's from nhal wledd wledd and our speakers are taking this to the next level deleting the first consonant and so we have this forms that are also sometimes found in pigeons and creels in dialect languages there is a wide literature on that so situations in which the social control on the languages weakened are often marked by the spread and survival of forms typically acquired during the first stages of language acquisition by speakers and then lost when the social environment checked them and like correct the children and then acquired the correct forms do I have time? ok so third and this is like a way to cool down I was, while I was doing this research apart from the strictly linguistic analysis I was also paying attention to the way in which language was used to express the identity of those especially the second generations and of course when we think of second generation in Arabic speaking diasporic community we think of a mixture and of a balance between the Arabic Tunisian identity and the Italian identity but what I found is that the sum is always greater than the parts and that we find aspects which are typical of youth culture that we wouldn't expect and that we don't expect until we see them so of course youth culture is often characterized and it's the same here by processes of inclusion and exclusion so inclusion of members of the group and exclusion of all the ones who don't belong to the group and here people who are not part of the group are at the same time Italians living in Mazzara with whom maybe my speakers had good relationships but they were not clearly part of their group but also older Tunisian speakers in Mazzara which were from a different culture and who didn't take part in this polyphonic identity so for example this is one of the typical ways in which this inclusion and exclusion process is expressed in the facebook post in which one of my speakers the one who writes to Tobene Zia I'm fine Aunty posted a picture in which he was expressing sad feelings but it was a cool picture so the end says writes how are you and he says she writes back and he says I miss you at this point one of his friend interrupts this exchange with this sentence saying in which he managed to use three languages in a sentence which is composed by three words so that Bella is clearly Italian cool and it came and of course it's French so what he wants to say is it's in Italian expression to say the picture came out good, I don't know what is the geometric expression in English but he says that translating it in a mixture of Italian Arabic and French and of course the Italians will not understand what that means but I think that also this is a way to exclude the older and from the conversation so and this is achieved by using at the same time those of polylanguage in Italian, Sicilian Arabic and French sometimes English and I apologize for the language here so we have a mixture of Sicilian dialect of elements of very weird in this context gangster culture and of African American culture from the US and also this feeling of not fitting with the community that is felt by I think all the youth groups is here amplified by the fact that those speakers are not, some of them are not Italians, they have no Italian citizenship anyway they are perceived as the other in the context of Maserio del Bal they live in the Casbah and so they claim for them this otherness using the word clandestino which is of course in Italian illegal so we have here the word bro we don't think that Tunisian immigrants in southern Sicilian small town would resort to this but we have and the third one says morning illegals triggering the very like I don't know how to call that but the third speaker insults him but he replies saying I got that from you you illegal strong claiming of this otherness that is like in projected by our speakers to the point that they painted one of the walls of the Casbah with this very unusual ghetto thing and they were taking pictures posing as like the inhabitants of a real ghetto and the Casbah was for some time a sort of a ghetto it was really avoided by the Italians to do research and I was with my wife I asked, I didn't know where the Casbah was and I asked them how can I get to the Casbah and the Italians told me you don't want to go there and if you go there don't go to Via Bagno which was the place in which I conducted like I think 40 of my 65 interviews because it was the center of the Casbah and I think that 50 meters from the mosque the road ghetto on it is one of the roads in which through which you enter the Casbah so they made it their own by painting this thing and this gangster culture is not of course just borrowed and imported as it is it's given a Sicilian twist and of course from gangster to mafia the step is very brief so the speaker here writes Wasojmat Mafio also make room for the mafia guys and again triggering some other very interesting responses that I left out of this slide so this I think is another it's linguistic but it's something which is not exactly my field but I think it's equally interesting so the research in the next 10 years should be conducted in Maseradol this is in a view of Maseradol Valol should be conducted both on the strictly linguistic level to see how the third generation evolves if Arabic keeps being preserved with which kind of Arabic if this variety of this Masara variety of Tunisian Arabic rises or not but also from the point of view of identity and how the second and third generation Tunisians managed to shape their identity within a small country within a small village in a very peripheral area of western Europe but even of Italy if you think of it it's the most southern part of Italy, the most eastern part the most western part of Sicily it's somewhere in between Sicily and Tunisia this place is only one hour from where I live so I will keep doing research in the next 10 years and I hope I will have some updates like after a couple of years after I'm able to interview more third generation speakers and these are some of my sources which I will send you if you're interested and I thank you for your attention I would love to look at for a really absolutely fascinating presentation who has questions My mom is from Canada, you have a name? Oh great, another interesting place Yeah and they do the same things so when you said that they were doing what do you call it three codes in one sentence so I grew up like that as well So you're a native speaker of second language speaker because I was born and grown up here but I say sentences which have three languages in them with this old variety of Albanian Yeah, so like you say like I'm studying at the University of London for example I'm studying at the University of London Yeah and this is another area in which is understood and it's absolutely you probably don't know about it in Sicily, in the heart of Sicily at a town which is called Piana di Albanesi Bali of the Albanians in which an arborig community sought refuge when the Ottomans conquered their country basically and they've been there for centuries now and they're still speaking arborig after I think five centuries now five centuries and once again we have no status concerning this language this variety of Albanian is preserved in Sicily so yeah, come to Sicily and help us doing research When you said about diminutives I thought it was really interesting because we have exactly the same thing as well like words like flower, lulla everyone knows this word little flowers, lulli cell lulli cell cell is like Sicilian diminutives before it changed from but it's not actually the way in which Sicilian evolved because the L from Latin evolved into edu or edrw in Sicilian so this is an older version of the diminutives that you are preserving which is even more interesting Why is it that Sicilian diminutives are so strong? No, this is just a phonetic note this is the L that's Latin double L just evolved into an explosive in Sicilian so we have de so if you say stella in Sicilian we have shtida if you say cavallo we have cavagro bellais bella and so but what you're preserving is an older stage of romance which even though it was borrowed in Sicily or somewhere else and then brought to Sicily which is fascinating Thank you I don't know how relevant it is but I seem to recall that there is an influence of Arabic on Sicilian version of Italian as well I think a Pyrrhanello a well known in Sicilian writer wrote his PhD at the University of Berlin on the subject of influence of Arabic on the Sicilian very Sicilian dialect I didn't know about Pyrrhanello piece at this point I will try to get a copy of the dissertation we have a couple of studies and I used one of them which is a more recent study on the influence of Arabic on Sicilian which is a very strong influence so of course there is less call borrowing from Arabic into Sicilian but there is also grammatical influence so we have structures in Sicilian that are not attested in any other romance variety in southern Italy because they are clearly called from Tunisian or Libyan Arabic and sometimes it was interesting to see how influence of Arabic on Sicilian and the other way around influence of Sicilian on Arabic gave rise to similar results I left this slide out of this presentation because it involved the very deep knowledge of the way Italian and Sicilian works but we have for example the expression you go by this thing which is I think it's grammatical in English it's not grammatical in Italian I cannot say but if you speak Sicilian it goes out where you go you buy this thing is grammatical this is not this was already grammatical in Latin was something that was lost from Latin to Italian and was preserved by Sicilian but and Arabic it's even more common than it was in Latin so this structure grammaticalized in Sicilian and it's omniprovasive in Sicilian because it was there in Latin so we don't have to postulate direct influence of Arabic the influence of Arabic is clearly there because the way in which Sicilian dialect uses this structure differs from the way in which all the other southern varieties of Italian use them and Tunisia speakers, when they arrive they have this structure in their dialect and of course they think that it is grammatical in Italian so they bore it so you will find this structure in their L2 Italian because they have it in their dialect they hear it in Sicilian dialect and they think it's okay to do it in Italian so there was an interference from Arabic on Sicilian and now the way back from Sicilian to L2 speakers of Italian coming from Tunisia is very complicated but interesting sorry, my knowledge of code switching is a bit basic so I forget the basic question but there is a kind of fundamental role of code switching that you shouldn't be able to change grammatical construction in the switch so the example you gave with C-power gone on I think that should have been the infinitive in some perdercy so it should be perdercy so your question was firstly am I right in thinking that that does kind of break some sort of major expectation of codes which you can secondly why do you feel that is is it an indication of a particularly strong change or what is it no so this is, we have these two sentences it is the same verb so in the first sentence what I think the grammar is clearly Arabic so she is using, she is important the grammar Arabic on to Italian which means that to me that is not an indicator of any great change to me what is more interesting is this case in which first of all the switch between modal and the verb is not always allowed so I was studying some descriptions of code-switching in other diasporate communities Arabic diasporate communities and something like that rarely was rarely found in those communities when it happens what I expect is this actually is this because in this case the matrix language is clearly Arabic and unless the opposite is proof we would expect that we have only one matrix language when we get to this point we need to recognize we have two matrix languages and this to me is an indicator that the two languages are coming in real close contact because in this case the young female speaker 12 this is the most perfectly bilingual speaker that was able to interview and she would do that all the time code-switching but respecting at the same time the grammars of the of the two languages which is not the case here this speaker is younger and as code-switching the code-switching here the switch here also has a mixed matrix language but it fails to respect the grammaticality requirements of Italian of course but also of Arabic because I would have expected either my language or my language because the Italian possessives under certain circumstances can be used to emphasize after the noun in this case it tries and it fails and this is typical of also first generation speakers who have lived the entire life basically in Masara or 20 or 30 years in Masara tried to produce this kind of sentences but with results they are not always grammatical in neither of the language Are Sicilian or Italian verbs ever incorporated into Arabic structure like you know how Maltese does that and then my language does it too Oh yeah, yeah so we have so I have a couple so in the integration of verbs we have different ways of integrating verbs one is root extraction so for example from the Italian spesa so I'll go by grocery we have the verb subbis which in Libiana is to smoke so when I heard people saying an imsin subbis so I was interviewing a woman and said the one imsin subbis to me was very strange because she was telling me now it's enough I have to go smoke I said this is very weird but then they explained to me that it was I am going to buy grocery but we also have samples that are similar to Maltese so I have one of my speakers speaking of the financial crisis that had Masara de Barlow saying La Abed people sofri from the Italian sofrire which is conjugated with the prefix conjugation in Tunisian La Abed sofri or Hawaii Parkeji from Parkejiato Park which is just given an Arabic prefix and used in the language as it is more research is needed here because sometimes you hear the things and then you ask for more and of course when you ask they are never able to recollect this samples so you need endless of conversation because you never know when something like that might pop up I collected some of them but I suppose there is more and more I also have not the verb but from Italian staccare which means to unplug I have mistacchi which means staccato which is a participle al form from stacca i stacchi so yeah we have those and I guess that having spending more time with them than a single summer with my yield some very interesting result just come it's your place Would any of the speakers be able to speak al form? so this is I learned a lesson from trying to answer this question because part of my research was trying to realise how the diglastic situation of Arabic is important in the diasporic community so of course I tried to do that in a very indirect way so I had an excerpt from Al Jazeera and it was one of their taqirir of their report the initial report from a from a program and I had them listen to the report and talk about it but after two or three interviews they realised or they perceived that as a sort of an exon in Fusha which made them even more uncomfortable because I was not a native speaker so they and of course first generation speakers left Tunisia in the 60s and 70s and their knowledge of Fusha was not so high second generation speakers so they did the Tunisia school which is only five years they only had the elementary school of course five years of Fusha and then switching to the Italian school means that in two or three years you forgot all the Fusha assuming that you spoke Fusha in the first place so when I started interviewing them they didn't take it so well so I left this part of the because it was jeopardising the rest of the interview so I tried to do that at the end of the interview but then I realised that it was making my speakers uncomfortable so what they were saying was this subject makes me uncomfortable not the language, the subject even though it was a very neutral subject and they were just ready to move sometimes I tried to do it some other way by switching the conversation to religion or political politics was not an easy topic and they felt that the Tunisian government was watching them there it's a very weird situation because when I write there it's a neighbourhood so you think that you understand what is going on there are three coffee houses there and I was regularly going there doing my interviews there and then one of my one of my speakers and one of my Italian sources there told me privately owned coffee houses the the owner is paid by the government it's a public employee basically so what was going on there was not even the conversation that was going on there was not natural so even when speaking of religion they didn't use fusha and when I asked them about fusha fusha constantly ranked lower than Tunisian Arabic in terms of language attitude and appreciation so they told me I prefer my native language is Tunisian and I prefer speaking in Tunisian which was strange to me because usually even speakers who don't speak fusha very well will tell you that fusha is their native language while in this case they said and a fellow linguist worked on the Italian of the Tunisians so he developed doing interviews in Italian and from another perspective came to the same results Italian and Tunisian Arabic ranked higher ranked highest in terms of what the speakers how the speakers perceived those languages and Sicilian dialect and fusha was not so appreciated fusha mainly because it said we don't need it here and it's complicated because some speakers had bad associations of fusha with the Tunisian school of Maser del Vallo so they said sometimes when I ask them about the fusha they say no they will hit you on your hands which is of course but there were 8 or 9 year old speakers and had this perception of the way in which fusha is taught in a very traditional environment so I don't think that it's part of the repertoire of course they are able to follow the news or cartoons in fusha but of course active competence if it was there in the first place is lost I'll ask in any way more towards the beginning you presented this interesting discrepancy between the pha variable and the interdentals so from the Shedda dialect has gh and interdentals and the Mehdi dialect has pha and stops now of course fusha has pha and interdentals so I was wondering whether there was any kind of influence from the standard pushing the Shedda people to change got apart but nevertheless to retain the interdentals this was a question that and I was I talked with and I'm about that and she told me no Luca fusha has never an influence on the way on variation in the dialect so I said ok I think that it's I don't know whether this fusha or the idea of a prestige Tunisian urban variety that is pushing them because what I thought is that what I found is that speakers from Shedda they switched to co and they retained their interdentals and I found that educated speakers young educated speakers from Mahdiya started showing interdentals so even though they are the majority community in Mahdiya so they don't adapt to the other variables their variants with in terms of also vowels and diptones I left out of this presentation but they tend to realize interdentals not regularly but they they show in their dialects so actually I don't know whether this is because I when I started doing this I also used the diptones because I thought is this accommodation to the dialect of Tunis is there any influence from standard and since both Mahdiya and Shedda as A and O as the realization of the etymological diptones while standard as I and O and Tunis as E and O I thought I can use the the diptones to realize what is that they are accommodating to and they are preserving their diptones A and O so I I said so maybe it's not it's not Fusha but I had this conversation with Ana which told me Luca leave that out of your paper because we don't have Fusha and even when and the way she put it is even when we claim influence from Fusha it's not actually Fusha it's like she wrote in her paper it's one of the papers of her papers it's the fact that those are highly educated speakers so the education is a socio linguistic variable in the sense that people are acquainted to other varieties of Arabic and it's not Fusha in itself that is influencing their variety and I'm not that sure about this can be applied here Presenting the Shiba Nadia community but I'm sure based on second generation some of the marriages might be mixed I don't know so I mean do you record such speakers or I have speakers so the mixed marriages are not are not so many not because they don't there is something which prevents marriages from people from Shaba Nadia within the community but because speakers from Nadia and from Shaba try to go back to their villages and get their wives from there and sadly what happens is that also the situation is quite sad frankly because young adult male speakers go back to Tunisia and they source a wife in Tunisia in their hometown and the girls who are in Masala Dabal of course they have to marry and they also go back to Tunisia and the question is if they are too westernised for Tunisia living in Masala wouldn't they be too westernised for Tunisia living in Tunisia but at this point the answer is they are grown ups they are more than 18 year old and they have Italian citizenship so even if they are westernised they have a citizenship Italian citizenship so they can help so we don't have a lot of mixed marriages because of this because everyone tend to go back and marry at home but we have other communities where I have speakers from Tabarta and they also have good and their patterns it's very similar to the pattern that I experienced in Shemba so switch to one of my speakers without showing a very high mental linguistic competence without being asked the Mahdiya variety is the winning variety here and you see I'm from Tabarka I should be speaking with G but I speak using the Qaw because I'm always with people from Mahdiya so it is clear to me that the community is accommodating to the Mahdiya variety of course not to we don't accommodate to a variety and taking into consideration all the variants as far as the Ola is concerned the Mahdiya variety is being accommodated to by members of other communities especially young people so it was interesting to me because they didn't speak Sicilian to me even though I'm a native speaker of Sicilian for my students of mine I started speaking Italian when I was at college I'm from a small rural village in my place you speak Sicilian you don't speak Italian on the phone if they call me to answer using Italian my mother will understand that there are people around me and I cannot talk so even though sometimes I was using Sicilian to them they answered in Italian and they said that Sicilian is for ignorant people it shows lack of education and cultural backwardness so the way Sicilian was then was then used in very informal settings such as Facebook and in this youth groups that I was not able to study in detail if not through Facebook and their internet ways because if I was there they were switching to Italian but judging from the way in which they used Sicilian on Facebook and on social media they know Sicilian not native like I recorded some very hilarious incident in the language that required very deep knowledge of Italian because they were using a word assuming that it meant don't care, don't pay attention to those people but he handed out using an F word and the other speaker was not even aware because he took it as a compliment and he kept answering in this surreal conversation it's linguistically speaking it's not a dialect of Italian it's a language it's a dialect of it's a romance dialect it's not a dialect in the way in which perceived dialects of English it's clearly a variety of romans that was talking in Sicily it pre-exists Italian of course Use Tunisian and Sicilian or Italian on social media this seems to be different to the way they use in real life I'm not sure whether this is different or different from the way in which they use language when grown-ups are with them because when I was doing interviews and recording even in I was in a school with lots of young Tunisians around they were speaking to each other and they were using Italian they asked them explicitly do you use Sicilian? they said no I don't like and during the question one of the question was do you use Italian do you use Sicilian as an Italian what is your language when do you use Sicilian and the only context in which they allow the use of Sicilian was to joke or when I'm really angry of usage of Sicilian on the social media but then consulting with one of my mentors told me why don't you go and check their social media because sometimes things that and this is not just something that happens for the Tunisians this is this professor of mine who told me to do that is a professor of Italian linguistics at the University of Palermo and he said we have studies concerning young Italians who are now some of my speakers in terms of Sicilian they don't use it in everyday life but they in a very creative way they use they recover and they use Sicilian on social media and it's a way in which the dialect is preserved even though it's not a living dialect anymore so what they're doing in this case is not very different from what young Italians or Sicilians are doing with Italian and Sicilian as a footnote I think of the detective stories of Camilleri Commissari Montalban was given Sicilian so he was Montalban was Camilleri is actually I know he's not Sicilian he lives in Rome and he lives in Rome and he's from Portenpedoble he's from where he lives he even knows it that's a very literary Sicilian sometimes his village is like I said 10 miles from my village so we know him personally and sometimes when I read his novels I say this is not what we say it's a very but there is a tradition of literary Sicilian which is used by so we have in Sicilian we have this literary language there's a poetry in Sicilian and it predates Italian poetry so there's always been there's been a tradition of literary Sicilian that is in Pirandello and also in Camilleri and there is now this new trend of using Sicilian on social media but also in music there are now some rappers and hip-hop singers in Sicilian who are using the real Sicilian the street language which is something that has never actually happened so they're doing it now I think it's a response to the global it's the sort of localization that they are borrowing music styles from the US from Europe and doing that in their Sicilian dialect but this is also new because it's the first time in which the real dialect finds its way in a form of art it's just music because literature has always been delivered in dialect Do you think Gomorra has something to do with it? Well, no, no, this predates it's before Gomorra Gomorra is an Italian TV show focusing on the maccha in Naples It's a completely different strength and Camilleri is an entirely different strength it isn't a mafia at all It's not this is Gomorra but it's not Camorra It plays with the world It's got nothing to do with this The ghetto I think comes from it's definitely something borrowed from African American culture because they were also there is another place in which they wrote Casbah crew on the walls so they're in some way importing and borrowing this silence from a culture which I didn't think could have an influence on the way No, they don't this is the major area of weakness they admit that they don't understand Moroccan so the mutual intelligibility of Arabic dialects and the historic contests such as Mazad El Balol is not the same as in the Arabic speaking world There are a couple of Moroccans in town and they adjust to Tunisia because their Moroccan dialect is not readily understood by young Tunisians Unfortunately, time has run out Thank you so much once again for a wonderful talk