Linguistic purism and language shift: a guise-voice study of the Italian community in Sydney.

This article focuses on the Italian community in Sydney, Australia. In Australia, besides English, the majority official language common to all Australians, there are numerous Aboriginal and immigrant languages used regularly in daily life. Multilingual Australia is very proud of its rich language resources. Yet the attempts at maintaining them produce little result, as it seems common for minority languages to be abandoned once English is acquired, albeit with different patterns of language shift. In the case of Italian, the shift is rapid, much more rapid than some of its demographic characteristics would predict. Italians in Australia are not simply bilingual in Italian and English. Their language varieties are numerous and variously distributed according to their generation of migration, their geographical origin in Italy, and their socio-economic position. Most first generation migrants have an Italian dialect as their first language. Dialect monolingualism marks the lower socioeconomic classes, but since most migrants are upwardly mobile people they can also speak some Italian. English is the third language of Italian migrants. In summary, the language varieties of the Australian Italian community are the results of recent contact between the old premigration varieties and English.