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A New Language, A New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States, 1890-1945. By nancy c. carnevale. Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Centennial Series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 264 pp. $45.00 (cloth).
Nancy C. Carnevale begins her interesting, innovative study by narrating her own experience with immigration and language as a child, when she accompanied her immigrant parents on a return trip to their native town in south-central Italy. There she discovered that her father had not been speaking Italian all those years at home in New Jersey; he spoke a dialect from Molise, and only used standard Italian when speaking in formal situations. Carnevale's mother, however, under the pressures of the visit to her native town, forgot words in dialect and spoke a mixture of English and Italianized English words. Clearly, language was a core issue in her parents' migration experience yet so personally fraught with issues of class, culture, and displacement as to be barely verbalized. Carnevale's book, based upon her dissertation, expands upon this personal experience with broad research and many other specific examples.
In A New Language, A New World, Carnevale complicates but does not challenge the classic assimilationist narrative that has dominated U.S. immigration studies for decades. Social scientists have long used language as a marker of immigrants' "progress" in becoming American, assuming they gradually abandon their native tongue as they blend into their new host society. But what if the immigrants' language itself is in flux, culturally contested, and divided into dialects? As Carnevale states, "Highlighting the single issue of language within a specific historical context allows us to see how the formation of ethnic identity occurs in the interplay between host society and immigrants/ethnics" (p. 159). Carnevale uncovers the tension between standard, literary Italian and the dialects actually spoken by immigrant families yet reviled as uncouth and improper. This tension, mixed with racial overtones, made language education programs more politically and culturally charged as vehicles of Americanization or Italianization. An example of...