Italian American Gangsterspeak in American Cinema and Italian Dubbing

This study aims to analyze the language variety spoken by Italian Americans gangsters in acorpus of five American drama films released in the 1990s, as well as the strategies usedduring the process of dubbing into Italian. Several studies have focused on the representationof Italian American gangsters in Hollywood films. However, most of the scholars who haveworked on this topic have approached it from a film studies or a cultural perspective, while, tomy knowledge, no one has investigated the characters' linguistic characterization. Indeed, theidentity of Italian American gangsters in American movies is always clearly identifiablethanks to a series of visual and other extra-linguistic elements which recur in the films of thegenre. However, it is a fact that language plays an extremely important role in theconstruction of the stereotyped identity of these characters, as the final result is achieved notonly through the selection of the elements which act at the level of the visual code, but alsothanks to the interaction of these features with the ones that act at the verbal one.Undoubtedly, the language variety spoken by the protagonists of the films that constitute theobject of study of this research is heavily loaded with connotations. Such connotationsdefinitely contribute to characterizing the speakers, conveying both their ethnic origins andtheir social background. The elements that characterize the variety as an ethnolect areidentifiable mainly at a phonological (intonation; pronunciation), and a lexical level(phenomena of code switching and code mixing, and slang), while those which characterize itas a sociolect mainly act at a syntactic (non-standard forms), and lexical level (taboolanguage, and, again, slang). Italian dubbing seems to have established a set of consolidatedstrategies aiming at transposing the connotations conveyed by the original language in thetarget texts. The language variety spoken in Italian dubbing, indeed, cannot be considered asstandard, as it turns out to be connoted both from a diatopic and a diastratic perspective. Thecharacterization of the language from a diatopic perspective acts at the phonological(intonation, pronunciation), morphosyntactic (geographically connoted structures), and lexicallevels (code switching and code mixing, phraseology, and slang), while the elements thatconnote the variety diastratically act at the syntactic (non-standard forms) and lexical levels(taboo language and, again, slang). In general, the connotations seem to be maintained indubbing, although there are obviously differences among the various films, and some of thetarget texts are less connoted than their corresponding source texts