Comprendersi a Babele. La linguistica cognitiva e la ‘forza maggiore’ dell’egemonia culturale.

Linguistic proficiency in the host country’s language does not equate to cognitive or cultural consonance. The communicative asymmetry between institutional actors and migrant interlocutors is constituted by two interrelated dimensions. The first is linguistic: within the Italian legal–administrative context, normative texts — such as laws, decrees, and employment contracts — are typified by archaic lexical choices, complex and hypertrophic syntactic constructions, and a pervasively impersonal register. These features systematically compromise accessibility, not only for individuals with limited proficiency in Italian, often due to low levels of formal education, but also for native speakers lacking specialized legal literacy. Employment contracts, in particular, embed sector–specific jargon, intertextual references to legislative frameworks, and formal conventions that presuppose familiarity with the national legal apparatus. The second dimension is cultural and cognitive. Even when migrants acquire the vehicular language of the host society, their interpretative schemata remain anchored to culturally situated conceptual repertoires and pragma-linguistic practices originating in their L1. Consequently, communicative exchanges conducted in a shared linguistic code may nonetheless be undermined by divergent cognitive encodings of experience and action. These divergences manifest in the transposition of native conceptual structures — regarding temporality, agency, causality — into L2 syntactic and pragmatic forms, often resulting in opaque or misaligned interpretations. This Babel condition of structural misunderstanding systematically disadvantages the ‘guest,’ who is subject to an implicit yet pervasive cultural hegemony that frames the communicative field.