Advantages And Disadvantages Of Being An Italian Immigrant

Mini project a)

All my great-grandparents were Italian immigrants who stablished themselves in Colombo, South of Brazil, around the end of the 1800s. They were speakers of Veneto, a variety of Italian spoken in the North of Italy until nowadays, and so was the second generation. The third generation, my parents, are capable of understanding it, but not always of speaking it. My father would communicate with his parents exclusively in Veneto, but in Portuguese in any other social context. My mother can also understand it quite well, but will have difficulties building up sentences that are not commonly used.

The fourth generation, which includes my siblings and me, usually neither understands nor speaks it. My younger brother and I can understand some words or short sentences that are often used by our parents, but we have not been exposed to the language enough to be able to communicate.

Even though my generation cannot not be considered as Veneto speakers, we had a strong sense of being part of a group. In the school where I studied throughout my childhood, we had a clear separation between groups: the Italian descendants and the ‘others’, often students with darker skin and from lower social classes. Within the Italian descendants group, however, there were those who had specific marks in their speech which would give away their rural – and
consequently poorer – origin. In the work “carreta” (a specific type of truck), for example, a standard Portuguese speaker would pronounce the r sound as a glotal fricative [h], while a rural Italian descendant child would pronounce it as an alveolar tap [ɾ] .

Because this variety has very little prestige, speakers who would pronounce the “r” as the alveolar vibrant would undergo a lot of sanctions due to linguistic prejudice. The ‘worst’ of them being the distancing from the ‘descendants’ group and approximation with the ‘others’. It is clear that these conclusion are a result of my subjective experience and would need more research to establish which were the exact relations of power among these linguistic groups.

From 7th grade on, I changed schools and it made me very aware of my own speech differences. My new school was in Curitiba, a 1,7-million inhabitants metropolis, and my until-then urban variety was immediately removed from its prestige. There were two variations considered urban, whose more apparent speech mark was the use of the alveolar tap [ɾ] or the approximant alveolar [ɹ] in words like “porta” (door). The variant people from Colombo will perform is a retroflex flap [ɽ], very associated with people raised in the countryside.

In general, South Brazilian speakers perform the gentler approximant variable, but the Curitiba tap was usually associated to a small upper class of families living in Curitiba for a long time. It is possible that the tap comes from the São Paulo variation, in an attempt to sound as part of the elite as one can be.

I soon learned how to pass for a Curitiba native and it brought me both advantages and disadvantages.
The ability to pass for a Curitiba speaker granted me not only the social belonging to my immediate community in the classroom and school, but also the ability to hide my true origin when it was convenient. I was, however, accused by my Colombo friends of speaking like a snob. This shows clearly what was the hierarchy relation between the two varieties: by having influences from the Curitiba variety in my speech in a context where my background was known, attempting to pass as a person from the big city was seen as
disdain.

During my Social Sciences degree, I had a chance to look at the Colombo Italian-influenced variety almost as an outsider. I wrote my bachelor thesis on the process of identification within this considerably coherent social group formed by the descendants of Italian immigrants in Colombo and had the chance to interview both urban and rural Italian descendants. Being used to the Curitiba variation, I was able to notice how divergent from the standard Portuguese the Colombo variety was, specially when I listened to the recorded interviews, without the visual element.

By approximating myself from this latent part of my identity, one could expect some changes in the way I spoke, but it happened either temporarily or not at all. Throughout the last two years of my Social Sciences bachelor, I studied Italian and Veneto, and interacted very often with members of the Italian descendant community. It was almost impossible not to feel some sort of belongingness: a lot of the culture, values and world view, the shared immigration stories and experiences were familiar and comforting, they reminded me of my parents and grandparents. There was, however, a sense of superiority in relation to the ‘others’ and once I noticed these ideas were supported by educated, politically organized groups , I realized how dangerous that could be, and decided to act against instead of for the organized groups.

Nowadays I can transit among many varieties - more or less fluently. At home, my speech will get very affected by the Colombo variation. In any other situations, I think I assume different variations of the Curitiba/South Brazil Portuguese. Between friends or in situations in which my educated identity is assumed, my speech has a lot of elements from what is considered ‘uneducated’ language or from young ghetto speakers. I suppose this use of unprivileged varieties is a political strategy to either start a conversation about it or to distance myself from the part of society I would naturally be associated to, being a white, middle class, educated woman. In situations in which I have to prove myself competent or worthy of trust, however, my speech assumes a very formal variety.

Social class (intimally related to race) is a very significant variable that permeates all relations of language, identity and power in Brazil. In an extremely unequal society, variations associated with the lower class are very stigmatized and will stuffer serious sanctions. One’s inability to speak what is considered the ‘good Portuguese’ is associated not only to one’s lack of education, but also to one’s lack of character. The enormous gap between social groups is deepened and perpetrated by this unawareness or unwillingness to create awareness about language prejudice.