Chapter published in:
Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse
Edited by Minna Palander-Collin, Maura Ratia and Irma Taavitsainen
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 6] 2017
► pp. 241–265

Astride two worlds

Emergence of Italian-American identity in the Massachusetts immigrant press

| University of Northern Colorado
This paper explores the emergence of Italian-American identity and its correlation with changes in format, content, and language over the course of the first five decades of the twentieth century in La Gazzetta del Massachusetts (The Massachusetts Gazette), a weekly newspaper published in Boston, but intended for the Greater New England Italian community. A representative longitudinal sample of 528 equally-spaced issues between 1903 and 1949 reveals patterns that are suggestive of an evolving population and an ethnic community’s changing attitudes toward its ancestral culture and relationship with its homeland. Findings relate to prior work in the areas of the Italian immigrant language press, sociology, cultural assimilation and preservation, as well as studies of identity construction through language.
Keywords: immigration, news discourse, Italian, English, code switching, assimilation, cultural preservation, identity construction
Published online: 29 August 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.6.13rya
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