[4] The first immigrants, most of whom came from Basilicata, Sicily, Apulia, Piedmont, Lazio, Abruzzo and Molise, settled in Canadian lands in isolation; they were mostly single men who had left their country of origin due to population growth, lack of work and high taxation, intending to return soon.
Dating back to these years was the construction of major railroad and canal sections that generated a growing demand for labour.
[7] Around the turn of the century, there was a further growth in the number of Italians in Canada, with a change in the migratory flows, consisting not only of adult men between the ages of twenty and forty-five, but also of women and children.
From 1900 to 1913, although in smaller numbers than in the United States, Brazil and Argentina, Canada welcomed about 60,000 Italians, mostly from the south (Calabria, Abruzzo, Molise and Campania) and the northeast (Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia) who went to settle not only in the industrial hubs in Ontario, Toronto and Ottawa, but also in small towns.
Migrants learned about opportunities, methods of travel, obtained employment and housing through social relations with those in the land of destination.
The migration "boom" from Italy to Canada occurred from the end of World War II and involved to a greater extent those from Lazio, Abruzzo, Friuli, Veneto, Campania, Calabria and Sicily.
Italiese has the morphosyntax of standard Italian, a largely English vocabulary and the typical pronunciation of the dialect of the area of origin.
[49] In this case there is no influence of French but one of the hypotheses to explain this phenomenon is the contact with some Italian-Romance dialects such as Sicilian, which uses a single plural gender marker (Rohlfs, 1968; Varvaro, 1988).
On the contrary, knowledge of the gender rule would lead to its addition where not necessary in terms present in the standard vocabulary and would be the consequence of forms attested in the language used by Italian-Canadians such as barro (bar), sporto (sport), nordo (north), sudo (south) and clubi (club).
Voi is, moreover, currently considered the polite form in several Italian regions such as Calabria, Naples, northern Apulia, Rome, Ticino and Corsica (Rohlfs 1969), Campania (Radtke 1988) and Sicily (Varvaro 1988).
A further reason can be traced to the widespread idea of the difficulty in its use and its low functionality, so much so that in countries where Italian is learned as a second language it is the last verbal tense to be studied.
One explanation for this phenomenon may be contact with English and French where the article+possessive form does not exist or, as Berruto (1993) believes, this can be traced back to working-class Italian.
From the orthographic point of view, numerous are the phenomena of approximations, that is, English or French words that are spelled as they would appear in Italian, such as donguori (don't worry) and tencsalotto (thanks a lot) (Clivio 1986; Danesi 1985).
[...] It is not to be confused with code alternation, which is instead the choice of one or other of the languages spoken by a bilingual speaker depending on the situation or communicative sphere (family, friends, school, university, offices, stores, etc.).
In addition, code-switching is found, both in writing and speaking, to differentiate those dialogues and situations that occur in the home environment from the language used at work or in the community.
Code-switching in literature is also employed as a tool to increase the realism of certain scenes, to highlight the importance of the language and culture of belonging (Jonsson, 2005) and to represent the author's internal voice when it appears within the narrative text (Callahan, 2004).
[58] The dissemination of Italian language and culture was encouraged from the postwar period through the mass media and schools, which were important in keeping alive the sense of belonging to one's country of origin.
In 2023, there were 6,000 elementary-aged students enrolled in the Italian language extended day program in the York Catholic District School Board.
Also active in Canada is the Dante Alighieri Society with seven branches in Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, Québec, Vancouver, Windsor and Winnipeg.
In 2019, PICAI had to discontinue Italian language courses due to a lack of funding, mobilizing parents of students who signed a petition requesting that contributions be reinstated.
[63] Son to Italian immigrants, Johnny Lombardi was born in The Ward in 1915, and went on to found one of the first multilingual radio stations in Canada, CHIN in 1966, in Palmerston–Little Italy.
True Hollywood Story, in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, to help partially fulfill CJNT's ethnic programming requirements.
Telebimbi is an Italian language specialty channel owned by TLN Media Group that broadcasts programming primarily aimed at children.
Italo of Montreal is published sporadically and is written in Italian, with some articles in French and English, dealing with current affairs and community news.
La Comunità, while an older publication, was taken over by the youth wing of the National Congress of Italian Canadians (Québec chapter) in the late 1990s.
Some writers like Antonio D'Alfonso, Marco Micone, Alexandre Amprimoz and Filippo Salvatore are bilingual and publish in two languages.
The older generation of authors like Maria Ardizzi, Romano Perticarini, Giovanni Costa and Tonino Caticchio publish in Italian or in bilingual volumes.
In English the most notable names are novelists Frank G. Paci, Nino Ricci, Caterina Edwards, Michael Mirolla and Darlene Madott.
See also Writing Cultural Difference: Italian-Canadian Creative and Critical Works (2015) editors Giulia De Gasperi, Maria Cristina Seccia, Licia Canton and Michael Mirolla.