Confini mobili. Studenti latinoamericani all'Università di Genova

The University of Genoa and Minority Language Speakers. On the one hand, the Erasmus students; on the other foreign students, in our case Latin American speakers, who live permanently in the city or in the surrounding areas. The former object of a minimum communication attention from the Institution, the latter approved to the student rank and as such neither passively nor actively acting on the Linguistic landscape of the University. Not visually, at least. However, going to dig into the life stories of a group of Latin American students enrolled in the Department of Political Science in Genoa, we are faced with a group of learners who have very little to do with the children of the early diaspora that attest an unprecedented identity and linguistic repositioning of this important slice of the Genoese ethnoscape. The mature relationship with the language of the country of adoption, the use of Spanish in their families, the root of the community they belong to and the success aroused by the Spanish in the university classrooms, allows them to get closer in a learning environment without the insecurities and remorse observed in previous studies on linguistic contact in Genoa in education. This cannot but guide the educational choices and more generally the linguistic policy of a University naturally projected towards Latin America.