Our (local) dialect as symbol our pure Italian identity: some remarks from Italians in the UK

The goal of the talk is to investigate the linguistic attitudes of second-generation Italian migrants settled in different cities across the UK—namely Bedford, Cambridge, Peterborough, and London. I aim to understand what these speakers perceive as their pure language and if purity is used as a parameter to define the language they consider a symbol of their attachment to their homecountry (Italy). Two logical premises must be taken into consideration. The first is that migrants—especially those who left after the end of World War II—had a dialect as their first language, but they had a competence in Italian too. The second is that, based on previous literature, heritage languages are also defined by the speakers’ sense of attachment to them.While it is well established that Italian migrants had varying levels of competence in both Italian and dialects, it is equally important to recognize that the identification of a heritage language is shaped by the speaker’s own perspective. So, speakers may consider their HL neither Italian or dialect. So, in today talk, I question if purity plays a role in this identification process and if this process varies across the communities under investigation.