The relocation of English in migratory contexts: The case of the Filipino community in Turin (Italy)

This chapter aims at investigating processes of relocation of lan-guage resources we commonly associate with the English lan-guage, within recently established migratory/linguistic minorities in Italy, namely the Filipino community of Turin. To this end, studies on translanguaging may prove to be useful to better understand how Filipina/os dynamically and flexibly read-just the resources of their linguistic repertoires into their daily language practices to construct meaning and make sense of their world. Data involve a triangulation of participant observations, audio-recording of narratives, semi-guided interviews and casual con-versations. Analysis aims at investigating informants’ translanguaging practices in everyday occurring social interac-tions and their comments about language choice, attitudes and ideologies. To my knowledge, this chapter represents the first attempt to re-orient the investigation of the relocation of English within migra-tory contexts in Italy towards a postmodernist view of language spread, which treats it as ‘languaging spread’, or the ways in which individuals use language resources to acquire knowledge and reconstruct the social reality in which they act. The chapter is structured as follows: section 1 discusses the theo-retical framework for the analysis of the relocation of languages within minority/migratory contexts in Italy. In section 2, we pro-vide an outline of the Filipino community in Turin and the socio-linguistic situation in the Philippines. Section 3 presents sample and data on which our analysis is based. Finally, in section 4, we refer to main findings of our research.