Uses of English as a Lingua Franca in contexts of the new digital-financial communications for migrant communities in Italy

Abstract

The present paper intends to explore the impact of the new emerging digital modes of communication in the field of financial support to migrant communities residing locally in the South of Italy, as they could represent not only social tools for integration but also important instruments of linguistic mediation. One of its main aims is to analyse the mini-corpus of available texts, which linguistically may represent new resources to explore both in terms of intercultural communication, as well as disciplinary genres. The main issue is indeed correlated to the levels of accessibility and acceptability, and the potential need to revise ‘standard’ Western codes of communication, which are intuitively applied even to these kinds of direct communication. Text types that could be taken into account will be mainly of an informative type, i.e. aiming to target a wider audience of people speaking English and which could be also analysed in order to test: a) the text accessibility, and b) the actual strategies applied to enhance or which prevent communication in certain fields of action. One of these is banking and the EU/national communications as a social system, which could be considered here in the perspective of text simplification, as well as a setting for communication in English. Indeed, although various studies in the field of migrations and English as a lingua franca have been the object of recent research, it is important to reconsider the ‘variations’ of English as a core of this study, generating a new focus into the implications of such uses. In other words, the research addresses migrants as the main receivers of these informative texts, and could be also of interest to future mediators (also involving students of non-linguistic faculties at an academic level), who may interact with foreign nationals and migrants resident in the local area and need to perform economic transactions