Italian Return Migration: Discourse, Phonology and Recontextualised Identities

This paper goes beyond the situation of Anglo-Italians in the UK and aims at exploring the contemporary social and linguistic positioning of return migrants to Montefalcione from Bedford and Peterborough, which are towns comparable in size and in geographical position in relation to their distance to larger metropolitan areas (Guzzo 2014). The purpose is to discuss the identity-marking process of return migrants from mixed-identities, reconstructing migrants’ memories to identify specific relevant variables which play a role in the migrants’ identity perception. In this study, the linguistic behaviour of a group of return migrants was thus analysed according to their construction and reconstruction of identity as it is expressed through their use of English and their adaptation to the dialect model following their return through the analysis of three phonetic and syntactic variants. These are: (i) maintaining the labiovelar approximant in the secondary consonant cluster kw-, (ii) the lateral twin cluster in the demonstrative (masculine, feminine and neutral) and (iii) the collocation of the possessive modifier compared to the nominal phase