Sfide linguistiche per immigrati italiani nella Svizzera tedesca. Ieri e oggi

Due to the economic crisis in Italy during the nineties and the beginning of the new millennium, a new phenomenon of migration occurred, pushing Italians to leave the country and to head -again- towards Switzerland. The major difference with respect to former migrations in the sixties and seventies lies in the fact that many new migrants are often highly educated and have a high sociocultural background. These attributes provoked the establishment of the term ‘Cervelli in fuga’- brains on the run. These sociocultural premises imply a relatively wide linguistic repertoire among these new migrants which includes not only often English, French but sometimes German too. The following article analyzes how language competences and usages differ between the ‘cervelli in fuga’ and migrants who immigrated to Switzerland in the sixities and the seventies