Code Mixing and Language Interference: The speech of Georgian Immigrants

Since the 1990s of the last century, the augmenting emigration from the Post Soviet area into the countries of Europe brought about a formation of contact-induced linguistic phenomena in the languages of the Immigrant communities, caused by the interference between the L1 of Immigrants and the main language of the host country. The paper deals with a case study, illustrating the contact-induced phenomena emerging in the speech of Georgian immigrants in Italy. Particular attention will be paid to the intrasentential code-mixing, in the sense of Bhatia & Ritchie (2005): ‘Code-mixing ’ (CM) refers to the mixing of various linguistic units (morphemes, words, modifiers, phrases, clauses, and sentences) from two participating grammatical systems within a sentence. CM is intrasentential and is constrained by grammatical principles and motivated by socio-psychological motivations’. Some examples from the casual speech of Georgian immigrants (see below) will be analyzed, with focus on various patterns of morphological embedding of Italian words in Georgian as matrix language. Types of embedded words/expressions. Direct embedding: 1. p’ulici-eb-s ak’eteb