Ways out of Babel: linguistic and cultural diversity in contemporary literature in Italy

Italy, traditionally a country of emigration, has become over the past thirty years a country of immigration. Today, millions of people of very different origins live in the peninsula, and this trend is increasing. One of the effects is the literature produced by immigrated writers choosing Italian as their means of literary expression. The first such texts appeared around the year 1990. One of the most significant features of many of these texts is their multilingual character: even though written in Italian, they are rich in elements connected to the authors' first languages. The present study is the first comprehensive analysis of the phenomena of multilingualism in the texts of immigrated authors in contemporary Italy. It applies a linguistic analysis to describe the way the writers deal with the Italian language and show how Italian is influenced by other languages in their works. Furthermore, this study considers the cultural aspects connected to this linguistic diversity as well as the possible functions of this multilingual writing.