Italian Immigration Guides During Mass Migration to Argentina. Linguistic Aspects

Abstract

While letters and popular narratives written by Italian immigrants have been analyzed with historical and sociolinguistic perspectives, only scant attention has been paid to texts written for potential emigrants. Based on a comparative study of selected guides produced for Italians emigrating to the Americas during mass migration between the 1880s and the 1920s, this paper evaluates some linguistic aspects of texts for Italians emigrating to Argentina. The numerous guides compiled by Giuliano Corniani, Arnaldo Tortesi, Bernardino Frescura, Arrigo De Zettiry, and the Commissariato dell’emigrazione provide detailed information on the transatlantic journey from Genoa to the Río de la Plata, on Argentina's history, geography, climate, government, immigration laws, and job opportunities for laborers and colonialists. They use a colloquial written variety of Standard Italian, rich in dialogues and devoid of technical terminology to accommodate dialect-speaking migrants with varying levels of Italian proficiency, while promoting at the same time the diffusion of the Standard language among them. A few of the texts by Frescura and De Zettiry evoke the plurilingual reality on board the ships and provide short linguistic guides to Spanish, thus fostering the migrants’ future bi- and plurilingualism at a time of increasing literacy levels and decreasing mass dialectophony.