Emigrate
The Story of Italianqualunquismo: political disengagement, literally “whatever-ism”
The final chord was played, and Neil, my accompanist, kept his foot on the pedal, letting the notes hover in the air a moment longer. Then, total silence. He raised his eyes to mine and looked at me expectantly.
I turned toward the examiner, a man in his fifties with the same impenetrable facial expression they all seem to have. He was still writing, which meant I had a moment to gather my thoughts. Singing exams always made my throat dry up, as if someone had wrapped kitchen paper around my tongue. I took a sip of water and felt the adrenaline begin to smooth out. “I will now perform my folk song,” I said. “It is called ‘Vola colomba.’ ”
I was fourteen, and singing “Vola colomba” was the first time I had ever really needed to produce Italian. Exams like these punctuated my teenage years, back when I dreamed of becoming an opera singer. Vocal training was regular, disciplined, and demanded that I pronounce Italian, German, and French like a native. Mum would sit with me at the kitchen table, running through the lyrics of arias I’d been given to make sure I pronounced the Italian properly. I was regularly wrong; at school I had learned Spanish prosody, the stress and rhythm of a language, which in Iberia punches out like a ricochet. Italian words are more irregular, delivered with a wider pitch range that, like music, lilts words up and down expressively. The vowels are so similar between the languages that I’d frequently cross-contaminate my consonants, releasing the salivating hiss that creeps through the Spanish s like a pressure valve into a poor, unassuming Italian word, like la musica. “That’s Spanish!” Mum would wince, as if I’d scraped a fork across a plate. But I’d never had an Italian lesson. I didn’t know any better.
Moments like that were painful reminders of my distance from Italian, my accent betraying my total Englishness and now the other languages I was adopting, too, and I felt like a fraud. But at my nonna’s house in Holloway—where I had first learned “Vola colomba”—my Italianness went unquestioned. She had heard the song as a young woman; it had been written about Trieste, the Italian city split in two during the Second World War, and in it the singer tells a dove to fly down and speak to their beloved, who is praying desperately at church for their return.
“Diglielo tu che tornerò / Dille che non sarà più sola / E che mai più la lascerò”—tell her I’ll come home, that she won’t be alone anymore, and that I’ll never leave her again.
Nonna knows all the words to “Vola colomba” and sings it with a descant harmony in her high soprano voice, which she learned from singing with her siblings, none of whom had any formal musical training. Long after that singing exam, Nonna would grin at me from her sofa with a glint in her brown eyes, and I knew that this would probably be followed by a request to stand up and sing our song. For the first time in my life, we were speaking Italian together—it just happened to be sung. There is a video of me, Nonna, and her sister, Zia Elvira, singing it in Zia’s garden from more than a decade ago, with Zia and I on the same line and Nonna soaring above. It has entered family folklore. And even though it is about Trieste, none of us think of Trieste when we sing it. When I sing it, I think of my nonna; and when Nonna sings it, she thinks about her Italy, hundreds of miles away from Trieste, and the childhood of which she is the last remaining witness.
Tell her I will come home.
Tell her he needn’t be alone any more
And that I’ll never leave her again.
Emigration may well be one of the greatest causes of linguicide in the world. In just three generations, and sometimes even two, most emigrant families will lose the language that connected them to their place of origin. For Nonna, that’s an old brick farmhouse in the middle of nowhere in the mountains of Piacenza, in Emilia-Romagna. I have only been there once; there is no electricity, no running water, and no inside toilet. Nonna’s childhood in poverty—la miseria as it is called in Italian, which feels far more evocative—was worlds, and languages, away from my privileged upbringing in north London. It’s an upbringing her grandchildren would probably never have had, had she stayed. Such economic progress usually demanded the sacrifice of one mother tongue for another.
The Italian American poet and translator Joseph Tusiani said that from the day in which a son says “Mother” instead of “Mamma” and “sky” instead of “cielo,” there’s a “separazione spirituale che lo studioso di linguistica non può catalogare”—a spiritual separation that even the most studious linguist would struggle to explain. We understand that language is one of the ways in which we pass our identity and heritage down to our children, and yet many families seemingly let go of their heritage languages, perhaps by what they feel is choice or necessity. Language planning policies from governments, both at home and abroad, often fall suspiciously quiet when it comes to the continuity of emigrant languages.
When we talk about linguicide, we’re often talking about minority languages in their own countries; languages like Basque in Spain or Māori in New Zealand, which predate the nation-states they went on to precariously find themselves in. Stories like this dominate our understanding of how languages are erased. But the truth is that many countries are not only hostile to the competing indigenous languages that may belong there, but also to foreign languages that resettle, just like people do. In a couple of generations, emigrant families can go from being pockets of linguistic hyperdiversity to total monolingualism in a rapid language shift, the term given by linguists to the sublimation of one language into another.
This new reality is sometimes celebrated as integration. But not only does this ignore that bilingualism is just as effective a means of integration, it passes over the seismic personal cost of language loss in migrant families. The cost to the country is just as significant; according to one economist, the willful monolingualism of a country like the UK—a stereotype so famous, there is an entire Wikipedia entry about it—costs us £48 billion a year through lost business opportunities alone.
In this chapter I’ll use Italian—the emigrant language I’ve watched slip away from my family in the UK—as a test case to examine how emigrant language loss happens and who might be responsible. This was a responsibility that, growing up, I always assumed to be mine and my mum’s. When I was younger, I can remember complaining to Mum that she didn’t send me to Italian class after school, like Nonna did for her. “You didn’t want to learn Italian!” she still says today, as if my fate had been sealed long ago by my errant child self. I’m sure she’s telling the truth, even if I don’t recollect it. Given that Italian was never offered as a subject or a club at school, I’m not sure how much information I ever really had on it; my parents, similarly, were never told about the benefits of retaining heritage languages.
In one of their essays on linguicide, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Phillipson talk about this—the mass loss of heritage languages in Western countries with high immigrant populations, where children can’t access lessons in the languages their parents and community speak at home. The linguists do not mince their words: the lack of “immigrant minority education in these countries” equates to “linguistic genocide, as defined by the UN,” they write. They do not blame people like my mum or my nonna for not passing Italian on. They blame our government.
“I love the language, that soft bastard Latin,” Lord Byron wrote in his poem Beppo. Italian, for him, “melts like kisses from a female mouth, / And sounds as if it should be writ on satin.” In contrast, English was “whistling, grunting guttural, / Which we’re obliged to hiss, and spit, and sputter all.” Hundreds of years later, Italian still holds a certain allure. The language learning platform Babbel ran a poll in 2024 searching for the world’s sexiest accent, and the six thousand people they surveyed placed Italian at the top of the list. Linguists over the years have speculated as to why Italian consistently holds this position; is it its purring, rolling r, its undulating pitch? Or is it because of our often positive association with Italy and the values we place on that culture—the food, the music, the way people look—as inseparable from its language?
Copyright © 2026 by Sophia Smith Galer. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
