The Senegalese community in Naples – lingua-cultural exchanges and L2 acquisition in diachronic perspective

The concept of ‘linguistic nationism’, which shaped identities around language rather than ethnicity, belongs to the past. Nowadays 10 million Europeans work in other Member States: EU counts now 500 million citizens, 27 Member States, 3 alphabets and 23 official languages. Immigration flows – according to Eurostat about 3.5 million persons settled in a new country of residence in the EU in 2006 – have introduced a variety of languages. At least 175 nationalities participate in the EU social and working life, making the Union an increasingly multilingual and multi-ethnic society. The co-existence of many languages within European countries is an ever growing phenomenon, which embodies the European Union's aspiration to be ‘united in diversity’. The route from marginalization to integration passes through multilingualism, so as to prevent linguistic diversity from hindering communication and producing social exclusion. A successful multilingualism policy has become a main concern, as the 2005 EU Commission communication “A new framework strategy for multilingualism” highlighted (not to mention Bologna process 1999, Lisbon strategy 2000, Copenhagen process 2009-2010). Recent surveys show that half of the EU citizens can use at least one Second Language: from 99% in the case of Luxemburgers, to 46% of Italians and Portuguese. In this language-sensitive perspective, a pilot project of the Department of Psychology of the Second University of Naples aimed to analyse and describe the situation of the acquisition of Italian as L2 by Senegalese community in Naples, which is one of the better organized in Italy and consists of about 1200 people (only 50 are females). This pilot study examined the linguistic competence of 15 male Senegalese informants, aged 28-36 (the usual age range for migration in this community), by administering self-assessment questionnaires and through interviews. The results highlighted a correlation between the Senegalese migrants’ L2 acquisition and their lingua-cultural multi-layered background, as will be illustrated in the present paper. In Naples, the migrants have to cope with consistent overlapping and code-switching between the local language(s) and standard Italian, and some interesting semantic shifts are produced (e.g. the Senegalese use of the word ‘zii’, to signify ‘policemen’) as well as pragmalinguistic variation (e.g. in the exchange of greetings). Relevant aspects of the Senegal/Europe contact story were also taken into account to shed some light on the phenomenon of Senegalese immigration in Italy, with a focus on linguistic communication.