MovIt Moving Italian(s): Standard language change among moving Italians.

When people migrate, their language moves with them. So far, sociolinguistics has focused primarily
on the language of working class migrants, paying particular attention to non-standard phenomena.
Hardly any research has been conducted on the evolution of the standard language of highly
educated speakers who leave the homeland. This project addresses these research gaps by using a
crowdsourcing application (SPEAK-IT!) to investigate how standard language norms acquired in the
home country evolve in the repertoires of highly educated Italians living abroad.
These 'elite' migrants represent an ideal test case, since they are assumed to master the two
standard norms that characterize contemporary Italian: a literary standard and a so-called neostandard Italian. The emergence of the latter variety is to be understood against the background of
de- and re-standardization dynamics attested in many European standard languages.
This project examines standard language change outside of Italy by comparing language production
and language perception in terms of the duration of migration of the speakers. Data collected in
Switzerland and Belgium will be combined with control data collected in Italy.