Article published In:
Australian Review of Applied LinguisticsVol. 37:1 (2014) ► pp.24–42
Exploring the bilingualism of a migrant community through language dominance
This study outlines a linguistic profile of two subgroups of Italian English circumstantial bilinguals – one dominant in English and the other dominant in Italian – by exploring for the first time their linguistic repertoire through the Gradient Bilingual Dominance Scale (Dunn & Fox Tree, 2009). The scale takes into account language background/history, language use and phonological interference, three main clusters of indicators that make up their dominance. The analysis is further complemented by additional descriptors adapted from Marian, Blumenfeld and Kaushanskaya (2007) and Baker (2011). Over one hundred English dominants (EDs) and Italian dominants (IDs) of Italian descent living in Australia were administered a survey. Results indicate that the scores yielded by the scale broadly parallel the data on self-reported dominance. The contrastive analysis of single variables, however, reveals both discrepancies and similarities between the two groups. While both groups use and are exposed to both languages and self-report high proficiency in the four skills, EDs differ from IDs across indicators such as language attrition and phonological interference. These outcomes confirm that the examination of these subgroups of Italians through the components of their language dominance offers a concise analysis of their linguistic features that makes allowance for both the individual and the societal elements of their bilingualism.
Keywords: bilingualism, Language dominance, Italian, immigrant language
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].
References (77)
Antoniou, M., Best, C. T., Tyler, M. D. & Kroos, C. (2011). Inter-language interference in VOT production by L2-dominant bilinguals: Asymmetries in phonetic code-switching. Journal of Phonetics, 39(4), 558–570. 
Argyri, E., & Sorace, A. (2007). Crosslinguistic influence and language dominance in older bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10(1), 79–99.
Baker, C. (2009). Survey Methods in Researching Language and Education. In N. H. Hornberger, (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Education (Vol. 21) (pp. 35–46). Berlin: Springer.
(2011). Foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism (5th ed.) (Vol. 791). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Baldassar, L. (2007). Transnational families and the provision of moral and emotional support: The relationship between truth and distance. Identities-Global Studies in Culture and Power, 14(4), 385–409.
Baldassar, L., Baldock, C. V. & Wilding, R. (2006). Families caring across borders: Migration, ageing and transnational caregiving. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Baldassar, L. & Pesman, R. (2005). From Paesani to global Italians: Veneto migrants in Australia. Crawley, WA: UWA Press.
Bedore, L. M., Pena, E. D., Summers, C. L., Boerger, K. M., Resendiz, M. D., Greene, K., Bohman, T. M. & Gillam, R. B. (2012). The measure matters: Language dominance profiles across measures in Spanish–English bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15(03), 616–629.
Bettoni, C. (1981). Italian in North Queensland: Changes in the speech of first and second generation bilinguals. Townsville: James Cook University of North Queensland.
(1991). Language variety among Italians: anglicisation, attrition and attitudes. In S. Romaine (Ed.), Language in Australia (pp. 263–269). Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press.
(1993). Italiano fuori dall’ Italia. In A. A. Sobrero (Ed.), Introduzione all’ italiano contemporaneo. La variazione e gli usi. (pp. 411–460). Bari: Laterza.
(2007). Un profilo socio-linguistico della comunità italo-australiana. In A. Ciliberti (Ed.), La costruzione interazionale di identità: repertori linguistici e pratiche discorsive degli italiani in Australia (Vol. 561) (pp. 36–67). Milan: Franco Angeli.
Bettoni, C. & Gibbons, J. (1990). L’influenza della generazione e della classe sociale sugli atteggiamenti linguistici degli italiani in Australia. Rivista Italiana di Dialettologia, 141, 113–137.
Bettoni, C., & Rubino, A. (1996). Emigrazione e comportamento linguistico: un’indagine sul trilinguismo dei siciliani e dei veneti in Australia (Vol. 71). Galatina (LE): Congedo.
(1998). Language maintenance and language shift: Dialect vs. Italian among Italo-Australians. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 21(1), 21–39.
Birdsong, D. (2006). Dominance, proficiency, and second language grammatical processing. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27(1), 46–49.
Blommaert, J., & Rampton, B. (2011). Language and superdiversity. Diversities, 13(2), 1–21.
Caruso, M. (2010). Italian language attrition in Australia: The verb system. Milan: FrancoAngeli.
Castles, S., Alcorso, C., Rando, G., & Vasta, E. (1992). Australia’ s Italians: culture and community in a changing society. North Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Cavallaro, F. (2006). Language dynamics of an ethnic minority group: Some methodological concerns on data collection. The Linguistics Journal, 1(3), 34–65.
(2010). From trilingualism to monolingualism? Sicilian-Italians in Australia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2010(206), 109–154.
Chincotta, D., & Underwood, G. (1998). Non temporal determinants of blingual memory capacity: The role of long-term representations and fluency. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1(2), 117–130.
Choi, J. K. (2010). Bilingualism in Paraguay: Fourty years after Rubin’ s study. In E. Schleef & M. Meyerhoff, (Eds.), The Routledge sociolinguistics reader (pp. 188–200). London: Routledge.
Ciliberti, A. (2007). La costruzione interazionale di identità: repertori linguistici e pratiche discorsive degli italiani in Australia (Vol. 561). Milan: FrancoAngeli.
Clyne, M. (1991a). Community languages: the Australian experience. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
(1991b). Overview of ‘immigrant’ or community languages. In S. Romaine, (Ed.), Language in Australia (pp. 215–227). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(2004). History of language contact research. In U. Ammon, (Ed.), Sociolinguistics: an international handbook of the science of language and society (Vol. Bd. 3.11) (pp. 799–805). New York: Waltern de Gruyter.
(2005). Australia’s language potential. Sydney: UNSW Press.
Clyne, M., Hajek, J. & Kipp, S. (2008). Tale of two multilingual cities in a multilingual continent. People and Place, 16(3), 1–8.
Cooper, R. (1971). Degree of bilingualism. In J. A. Fishman, R. Cooper & R. Ma, (Eds.), Bilingualism in the Barrio (pp. 273–309). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Cutler, A., Mehler, J., Norris, D. & Segui, J. (1992). The monolingual nature of speech segmentation by bilinguals. Cognitive psychology, 24(3), 381–410.
De Houwer, A. (2007). Parental language input patterns and children’s bilingual use. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28(3), 411–424.
de Jong, N. H., Başbaĝi, R., Kan, S., Yıldız, C. & Daller, M. H. (2011). Language dominance in Turkish- German bilinguals: methodological aspects of measurements in structurally different languages. International Journal of Bilingualism, 15(2), 215–236.
Dewaele, J.-M., & Nakano, S. (2012). Multilinguals’ perceptions of feeling different when switching languages. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 34(2), 107–120.
Dolas, J. (2011). An investigation of the relationship between performance on perceptual measures, productive measures and language history in fluent bilinguals. PhD Thesis, William Paterson University, USA.
Dunn, A. N. & Fox Tree, J. E. (2009). A quick, gradient Bilingual Dominance Scale. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12(3), 273–289.
Favreau, M., & Segalowitz, N. S. (1982). Second language reading in fluent bilinguals. Applied Psycholinguistics, 3(4), 329–341.
Fernandez, E. M. (2000). Bilingual sentence processing: Relative clause attachment in English and Spanish. PhD Thesis, City University of New York, USA.
Field, A. (2000). Discovering statistics using SPSS. London: Sage Publications.
Flege, J. E., Mackay, I. R. A. & Piske, T. (2002). Assessing bilingual dominance. Applied Psycholinguistics, 23(4), 567–598.
Gollan, T. H., Weissberger, G. H., Runnqvist, E., Montoya, R. I. & Cera, C. M. (2012). Self-ratings of spoken language dominance: A Multilingual Naming Test (MINT) and preliminary norms for young and aging Spanish–English bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15(03), 594–615.
Grosjean, F. (1982). Life with two languages: An introduction to bilingualism. Cambridge, Massachussets: Harvard University Press.
(2010). Bilingual: Life and reality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hasson, D. (2006). Bilingual language use in Hispanic young adults: Did elementary bilingual programs help? Bilingual Research Journal, 30(1), 45–64.
Hazan, V. L., & Boulakia, G. (1993). Perception and production of a voicing contrast by French-English bilinguals. Language and Speech, 36(1), 17–38.
Hoffmann, C., & Stavans, A. (2007). The evolution of trilingual codeswitching from infancy to school age: The shaping of trilingual competence through dynamic language dominance. International Journal of Bilingualism, 11(1), 55–72.
Kang, S. (2013). The role of language dominance in cross-linguistic syntactic influence: A Korean child’s use of null subjects in attriting English. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16(01), 219–230.
Kharkhurin, A. V. (2010). Bilingual verbal and nonverbal creative behavior. International Journal of Bilingualism, 14(2), 211–226.
Kinder, J. J. (1994). Il recupero della sintassi nell’italiano della seconda generazione in Australia. In A. Giacalone Ramat & M. Vedovelli, (Eds.), Italiano lingua seconda/lingua straniera (pp. 343–361). Rome: Bulzoni.
Lambert, W. E. (1990). Persistent issues in bilingualism. In B. Harley, P. Allen, J. Cummins & M. Swain, (Eds.), The developement of second language proficiency (pp. 201–218). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Laubach, L. B. (1998). Language use and attitude: A study of the use of Basque and Spanish by bilingual teenagers. Master’s Thesis, School for International Trainaing, Vermont, USA.
Law, N. C. W. & So, L. K. H. (2006). The relationship of phonological development and language dominance in bilingual Cantonese-Putonghua children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 10(4), 405–427.
Li, P., Sepanski, S. & Zhao, X. (2006). Language history questionnaire: A web-based interface for bilingual research. Behavior Research Methods, 38(2), 202–210.
Lim, V. P. C., Liow, S. J. R., Lincoln, M., Chan, Y. H. & Onslow, M. (2008). Determining language dominance in English–Mandarin bilinguals: Development of a self-report classification tool for clinical use. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29(3), 389–412.
Lising, L. (2009). Multicultural Australia: Accounting for Our Diversity in the Australian National Corpus. In M. Haugh, K. Burridge, J. Mulder & P. Peters (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 2008 HCSNet Workshop on Designing the Australian National Corpus (pp. 37–43). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Mackay, I. R. A., Flege, J. E., & Imai, S. (2006). Evaluating the effects of chronological age and sentence duration on degree of perceived foreign accent. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27(2), 157–183.
Macnamara, J. (1969). How can one measure the extent of a person’s bilingual proficiency? In L. Kelly, (Ed.), Description and measurement of bilingualism. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.
Marian, V., Blumenfeld, H. K., & Kaushanskaya, M. (2007). The Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q): Assessing language profiles in bilinguals and multilinguals. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50(4), 940–967.
Nguyen-Hoan, M., & Taft, M. (2010). The impact of a subordinate L1 on L2 auditory processing in adult bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13(2), 217–230.
Pennycook, A. (2012). Language and mobility: Unexpected places (Vol. 151). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Perry, F. J. L. (2011). Research in applied linguistics. New York: Routledge.
Portocarrero, J. S., Burright, R. G. & Donovick, P. J. (2007). Vocabulary and verbal fluency of bilingual and monolingual college students. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 22(3), 415–422.
Rieger, C. L. (2003). Repetitions as self-repair strategies in English and German conversations. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(1), 47–69.
Rubino, A. (1993). From trilingualism to monolingualism: A case study of language shift in a Sicilian-Australian family. PhD Thesis, The University of Sydney, Australia.
(2006). Linguistic practices and language attitudes of second-generation Italo-Australians. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2006(180), 71–88.
(2009). Language maintenace strategies and langauge attitudes of new migrants from Italy. In A. Mahboob & C. Lipovsky, (Eds.), Studies in Applied Linguistics and language learning (pp. 203–223). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.
(2010). Multilingualism in Australia. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 33(2), 17–17.21.
Sekerina, I. A. & Trueswell, J. C. (2011). Processing of contrastiveness by heritage Russian bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14(3), 280–300.
Shishkin, E. (2010). Language dominance and culture dominance: L2 acquisition, L1 maintenance, and culture identification among Russian immigrants in the U.S. PhD Thesis, University of Arizona, USA.
Tahan, S., Cline, T. & Messaoud-Galusi, S. (2011). The relationship between language dominance and pre-reading skills in young bilingual children in Egypt. Reading and Writing, 24(9), 1061–1087.
Tahta, S., Wood, M. & Loewenthal, K. (1981). Foreign accents: Factors relating to transfer of accent from the first language to a second language. Language and Speech, 24(3), 265–272.
Tamamaki, K. (1993). Language dominance in bilinguals’ arithmetic operations according to their language use. Language Learning, 43(2), 239–261.
Treffers-Daller, J. (2011). Operationalizing and measuring language dominance. International Journal of Bilingualism, 15(2), 147–163.
Valdes, G. (1992). Bilingual minorities and language issues in writing: Toward professionwide responses to a New challenge. Written Communication, 9(1), 85–136.
Vasilyeva, M., Waterfall, H., Gamez, P. B., Gomez, L. E., Bowers, E. & Shimpi, P. (2010). Crosslinguistic syntactic priming in bilingual children. Journal of Child Language, 37(5), 1047–1064.
Wilson, R. & Dewaele, J.-M. (2010). The use of web questionnaires in second language acquisition and bilingualism research. Second Language Research, 26(1), 103–123.
Yip, V. & Matthews, S. (2006). Assessing language dominance in bilingual acquisition: A case for mean length utterance differentials. Language Assessment Quarterly, 3(2), 97–116.
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Flores, Cristina, Chao Zhou & Carina Eira
2022. “I no longer count in German.” On dominance shift in returnee heritage speakers. Applied Psycholinguistics 43:5 ► pp. 1019 ff. 
Ibrahim, Anna, Patricia E. Cowell & Rosemary A. Varley
2017. Word frequency predicts translation asymmetry. Journal of Memory and Language 95 ► pp. 49 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.