The Italglish Project
The Italian that Australia made
Italians were among the largest migrant communities of postwar Australia, and the Italian they spoke here took in English the way Greek did: with Italian endings, Italian genders and Italian plurals. The Italglish Project records that language. It opens as a consultation because the people who should write this dictionary are the people who grew up hearing it.
What is known
The scholarship is older than most people expect. Gaetano Rando was writing about English influence on the Italian of Sydney in 1968. Camilla Bettoni recorded the Italian of North Queensland's first and second generations in 1981, and with Antonia Rubino studied Sicilian and Veneto speakers across Australia in 1996. In Canada the Toronto variety was named italiese and studied by Gianrenzo Clivio and Jana Vizmuller-Zocco; in the United States, Hermann Haller described the Italian American lingua franca. Michael Clyne put the Australian case in its national context in 1991. Those works are listed on the Research page, with the honest note that none has yet been checked word by word for this dictionary. That checking is the first job of the beta.
Why it opens as a question
Ethnolects is led by a Greek Australian. That is a qualification for the Greek dictionary and a limit here. We can read the literature, build the site and apply the method that To Booko proved, but we cannot hear an Italian Australian grandmother's word the way her grandchildren can, and we should not be deciding what it means. So the Italglish Project begins with three requests to its community: name the dictionary, send the words, and put forward the editors and advisers who will sign it off.
How it will work
Every entry will be traceable to a person who said it and a source that wrote it down. Spellings will be settled with contributors, never invented. Words heard in Australia, Canada and the United States will be kept apart and shown together. Disputes will be recorded, not erased. Community editors and academic advisers will be credited by name on the dictionary and in every citation of it. The beta mark comes off when the literature has been read in the original and the editors have read the whole dictionary. The method in full and how the consultation works.
Where the project lives
The working site, where you can vote on a name and send a word, is at italglishproject.com. To join as an editor or adviser, use the form on the consultation page.