“Wingapo, Father”. Multilingual Chronicles of Coming-of-Age Journeys in American Ethnically Diverse Animated Films and Their Italian dubbed version

Since the early 1990s, some of the most important American animation production companies have started to produce multilingual films offering deep sociolinguistic insights into non-dominant cultures and populations whose ethnolinguistic specificities are conveyed on the screen by dialogues interspersed with their native languages, acting as vital symbols of their identity. These films often tell coming-of-age stories focusing on young protagonists portrayed in the different stages of their journey from childhood and youth to adulthood and using different types of code-switching (cf. Myers-Scotton, Social motivations for code-switching. Evidence from Africa. Clarendon, Oxford, 1993; Bhatia and Ritchie, The handbook of bilingualism and multilingualism. Blackwell, Oxford, 2013) from the film’s base language (L1/L2) to their mother tongue (L3) to display crucial aspects of their familial, social, and ethnocultural dimensions. Starting from these observations, this chapter aims at illustrating how 5- to 21-year-old characters, belonging to minority cultures, use their mother tongues/L3s in the original version and in the Italian dubbed version of twenty American multilingual animated films released between 1991 and 2022, with the main aim of: pointing out, from a pragmatic perspective, the key functions fulfilled by the L3s as far as the construction of the young characters’ personality is concerned; illustrating, from a translational perspective, whether the protagonists’ linguacultural Otherness is either retained unaltered or manipulated in dubbing in the films’ Italian dubbed version; investigating, from a diachronic perspective, whether the amount of L3s in the original dialogues of the films released in the 1990s differs from the amount of L3s included in the films released in the later decades, as well as whether the choice of specific transfer, or non-transfer, modes for the L3s in the Italian dubbed versions varies according to the films’ release date, thus also verifying whether screen translation acts either as gateway or as gatekeeping in terms of translingual/transcultural transmission when coming-of-age animated films are at stake.