Living in Linguistic Limbo: Iranian Immigrants in Italy and the Struggle of Maintaining Linguistic Communities
Image by MLbay by Dalton Ascone Dalton Ascone is a senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, majoring in Linguistics, and minoring in Teaching English as a Second Language. Upon graduating, he hopes to remain in academia to pursue his research interests, which include bilingualism, second-language acquisition, and language maintenance in diaspora communities. He wrote this blog post for 418 “Languages and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023. The names of the participants have been altered in order to protect their anonymity. The Iranian diaspora is diverse and widespread, but if one were to try to describe one trait that unites all its members, it is this: they live their daily lives between a rock and a hard place. Between the broken immigration systems of their nations of residence, the endless coils of red tape they are forced to dance through, and the delicate geopolitical situation of their homeland, for some, the stress is so overwhelming that it becomes mund...