Communicative strategies in the Italian of Igbo-Nigerian immigrants in Italy: a contact-linguistic approach

Abstract

This paper reports on communicative strategies employed by Igbo-Nigerian immigrants living in the city of Padova (North-Eastern Italy). It proposes a new approach to the analysis of non-guided Second Language Acquisition (henceforth SLA). This approach treats immigrant speakers qua effective communication achievers. It focuses on communicative interaction, treating individual linguistic strategies as language innovations potentially initiating language change. It also sees non-guided SLA as a contact phenomenon and adopts a unified contact approach which puts all contact phenomena under the same umbrella.