The Vitality of Italian as a Heritage Language in the United States

This article is a first attempt to analyze the vitality of the Italian language in the U.S. according to three parameters: Capacity, Opportunity and Desire: a model proposed by Lo Bianco and Kreeft Peyton (2013). After defining the meaning of Heritage Language and of vitality of a language, the study describes the model and applies its parameters to the status of the Italian language in the U.S. The vitality of Italian as a Heritage Language in the U.S. has various implications both at the sociological level and at the level of language policy as well as educational language policy. The latter area is of specific interest to the present study.