La percezione del panorama linguistico in un'area della città di Bologna

The paper intends to explore whether ethnic spaces have been established in the urban area of Bologna and how residents perceive them. The selected neighbourhood, Bolognina, has the highest rate of foreign residents (25.4%), coming from 112 countries, especially from China and Romania (15.8% and 13% of the immigrant population). The research has been carried out in two phases. In the first phase, we have mapped the linguistic landscape, by photographing 2010 texts that are displayed in the public space and cataloguing them according to language(s), issuers, textual genres, locations, and contents. The actual occurrence of foreign languages in the written texts, when compared to the largely dominant Italian, does not correspond to the city residents' representations of the neighbourhood as an area marked by immigrants or even as an ethnic enclave. Language visibility does not reflect the actual presence of speakers, but it seems to respond to other factors, such as occupational activities, size and cohesion of groups, individual, group or community settlement strategies, representations and self-representations, attitudes of residents and public administrations. In the second phase, the research focused on awareness, representations and opinions about plurilingualism in the public space. In particular, we conducted focus groups and interviews with Italian and immigrant residents and representatives of the public administration to detect (a) the role of written languages in the perception of immigrant presence in the neighbourhood; (b) the perception of ethnic spaces; (c) the opinions on the legitimacy of the use of foreign languages in commercial and public communications. It appears that the long-lasting and significant presence of immigrants has not lead to the establishment of recognized and recognizable ethnic spaces. This is possibly an emerging phenomenon, but still uncertain.