New insights on spoken Cocoliche: a linguistic analysis of three samples from Argentina

This paper deals with three language samples taken from previously unpublished interviews with Italian migrants living in Argentina. These excerpts are particularly interesting on account of the speakers’ linguistic varieties, which, to different degrees, display consistent interference phenomena between Spanish and (southern) Italian dialects. As a further point of interest, the interviews were recorded in different periods and places (1986 in Buenos Aires, 2019 in Santa Fe), as well as with speakers coming from various Italian regions (Calabria, Campania, Sicily). This offers valuable insights into the different degrees and forms of language mixing in the community of Italian migrants in Argentina. The wide variety of data collected and examined by the authors enriches our grammatical and sociolinguistic knowledge of language contact in Argentina and delves into the problem of the so-called Cocoliche.