“E IL NAPOLETANO, DOVE LO METTI?” LO SPAZIO DEL DIALETTO NEI REPERTORI PLURILINGUI DI IMMIGRATI ADULTI A NAPOLI

Among the studies that explore the dialect-migration nexus in the Italian context, this contribution provides an insight into Naples, a city with a large foreign population and a strong dialect vitality. The aim is to observe the space occupied by the Neapolitan dialect in the linguistic repertoires of a sample of 257 adult foreign citizens resident in Naples, coming from 45 different countries and with very varied biographical and sociolinguistic characteristics. The data, collected through the combined use of the linguistic portrait technique and an oral autobiographical task, are presented in the light of a number of factors that had already been identified in previous studies as relevant in the process of spontaneous (non-)acquisition of sub-standard varieties: gender, level of education, sociolinguistic characteristics of the country of origin, work activity in Italy, specific neighbourhood of residence and personal relationships. The specificity of the corpus also made it possible to consider the level of linguistic competence achieved in L2 Italian by the participants involved. A composite and complex picture emerges, within which it is possible to identify some recurrent sociolinguistic profiles.