Abstract

This qualitative case study describes code-switching practices from Italian to English in a corpus gathered from 14 Italian migrants from two different migratory waves. The objective is to analyse whether the more recent migrants use codeswitching from Italian to English in the same manner as the older migrants do. Against expectations, migrants from the recent migration – who are accused in the literature of bragging about their linguistic skills – rarely switch to English. Thus, their language use is quite different from Italian migrants in the less recent waves, who instead tend to switch quite often, especially to insert specific terms due to linguistic insecurity.