Language Contact in Returning Migrants

This paper investigates codeswitching among migrants who have returned and settled in their home village of Montefalcione, in the province of Avellino (South of Italy), from the English cities of Bedford and Peterborough. From a linguistic point of view, returnees are multilinguals who spent their childhood in a migrant setting, during which time they were exposed both to their family language(s) and the dominant language of the society. They subsequently moved back to their families’ country and are, thus, no longer exposed to their L2. The data was collected from 1st and 2nd of returnees. The paper focuses on codeswitching to English in these two groups. The results of the study provide evidence that insertion is the predominant pattern of codeswitching and is primarily related to specific domains (work, society, food …). The data highlight that the semantic specificity described by Backus (2001) plays a crucial role in insertion pattern also in returnees.