Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the domains of use and some linguistic features of Italian-based multilingual practices spoken by fifteen interviewees from Sub-Saharan West Africa who mainly acquired Italian skills in Italy and occasionally reactivate them while working as street vendors in a park in Berlin.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on a continuum of multilingual practices based on the Italian language for which we propose the label "Italian in Transit" (IiT). IiT competencies are acquired by multilingual migrants and refugees along their migration or escape routes in Italy and are occasionally reactivated after moving to other European countries.

Our dataset consists of fifteen interviews with IiT speakers who come from Sub-Saharan West Africa and work as street vendors in a park in Berlin (Germany). Most of the participants learned Italian in Italy. However, two interviewees acquired Italian skills after moving to Berlin from Spain, facilitated by their previous competences in Spanish and/or Catalan. As for their current language uses, the interviewees report mainly speaking Mandinka as an in-group code in the park. Moreover, they sometimes reactivate IiT practices for different communicative purposes, such as for selling their products to Italian-speaking passers-by or referencing shared biographical-migratory experiences.

Linguistically, present infinitives (INFprss) are frequently generalized in eleven of the fifteen interviews. This generalization may be related to the fact that the participants acquired IiT skills at their workplace without supervision. However, unlike in Italian learner and contact varieties, INFprss are often generalized for past (vs. future or present) situations and have a perfective (vs. imperfective) meaning in our corpus. Furthermore, they usually occur with durative verb phrases and in irrealis propositions, thereby often conveying background information. Consequently, their alternation with other moods/tenses is sometimes innovatively employed by IiT speakers to evaluate and structure the information flow, especially in narratives.