Il code-switching arabo-italiano nel bilinguismo: tracce di una ricerca trasversale.

This dissertation focuses on language contact between Italian and Arabic, with a particular emphasis on bilingualism and code-switching. Within the larger field of linguistics, code-switching represents a significant phenomenon that has garnered considerable interest in multiple linguistic fields related to bilingualism. Early research studies mostly focused on morphosyntactic features; however, in recent decades, attention has expanded to consider a variety of languages and analytical perspectives, including formal linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and language pedagogy, among others. Furthermore, as the Italian linguistic context includes Arabic as a recent immigrant minority language, it is not uncommon to encounter bilingual speakers proficient in both Italian and Arabic, who typically alternate the two languages daily, mixing them to varying degrees. Therefore, considering the limited number of research studies about this subject and the sociolinguistic context of Italian-Arabic bilingualism in Italy, this dissertation aims to examine code-switching between Arabic and Italian within a bilingual context from several linguistic perspectives. This work firstly analyses linguistic choices and code-switching patterns between Italian and Arabic, investigating these phenomena also in relation to bilingual speakers’ language awareness and linguistic identity. The interaction between code-switching and metaphorical expressions is further explored in the analysis. Subsequently, attention shifts to the morphosyntactic properties of code-switching in determiner phrases, and finally, the study investigates language contact between Italian and Arabic in the linguistic landscape by taking into consideration a specific geographical area of the city of Florence. The study’s findings reveal inter-sentential, intra-sentential, and intra-lexical instances of code-switching between Italian and Arabic in bilinguals’ speech, as well as reveal the absence of a clear perception of distinct linguistic identity and a limited language awareness of the bilinguals towards their own language use patterns. Furthermore, the results demonstrate a higher prevalence of intra-sentential code-switching when metaphorical expressions are involved. Analysis of determiner phrases highlighted two code-switching patterns: switching at the phrase’s beginning and switching within the phrase, including instances of double determiners. Finally, the linguistic landscape analysis showed a limited presence of mainly bottom-up Arabic signs in the observed area, including bilingual signs characterized by code-switching phenomena. The final section of this work presents thematic and methodological generalizations that have emerged from the overall research, along with suggestions for future studies on Arabic-Italian language contact.