Thesis title: Le lingue della comunità capoverdiana di Roma: un’analisi sociolinguistica.
The research analyses the linguistic practices of the Cape Verdean community that settled in Lazio between 1963 and 2026, focusing in particular on the areas of Rome and Aprilia (LT). Through a sociolinguistic and ethnographic approach, supplemented by the use of linguistic autobiographies and a corpus of questionnaires and interviews, the work reconstructs the linguistic repertoire of the community, consisting of Cape Verdean Creole, Portuguese and Italian. After outlining the theoretical framework – which includes the concepts of linguistic community, community of practice, variation, prestige, diglossia and koine – the thesis describes the Cape Verdean diaspora and the historical and socio-economic reasons that led to the formation of one of the first African migrant communities in Italy, initially characterised by a strong female presence.
Empirical research shows that Cape Verdean creole still represents the community's identity language today, used in informal contexts and preserved even among second generations; Italian, the language of work and public life, takes on a central role in formal domains and is subject to interference from Creole and Portuguese. The analysis of the interviews highlights features attributable to neo-standard Italian, popular Italian and Roman dialect, as well as phenomena typical of linguistic contact, such as morphosyntactic simplifications, code-switching and phonological influences. The community emerges as a community of practice, united by emotional ties, associative networks and shared practices that reinforce linguistic and cultural transmission. The work concludes with a reflection on linguistic attitudes and the role of Creole as a heritage language, highlighting the need to value multilingualism as an identity and social resource.