‘What’s the meaning of…?’: Virtual communities as dialogical cultures in learning Italian

Communities are spontaneously created when members focusing on their business, negotiate meanings that affect their interests and their whole existence in an inter-subjective space. With the advent of Internet, there has been an extraordinary increase of virtual communities, referring in particular to Community Question Answering Services (Q&A) especially designed to help users to obtain information. The construction of these virtual contexts emphasize their “transactive” nature, “since the intentions are ‘negotiated’ according to the law of demand and offer of meaning” (Mininni, 2010, 25). Taking into account the complexity of intercultural relationships, based on linguistic and relational variety, this paper aims to describe how Community Question Answering can be a space both for the meeting of cultures and for collaborative ways of constructing knowledge. In particular, since language acts as the “meta-artifact” in the co-construction of reality, it represents the mediation tool that allows persons to communicate; on the other side, it can become the object of collaborative learning in Q&A sites, especially when the discursive object -that is Italian language- is understood from its origins as a "language-culture." The main purpose of this paper is to identify the discursive pathways and the interactional weaves of discussions when the topic is “language”. Focusing on the domain “Italian Language” on Stack Exchange, both English and Italian online interactions dealing with learning Italian language have been analyzed through sentiment analysis (quantitative analysis) and discourse analysis (qualitative analysis), assuming that interactions with questions in Italian are different than those with questions in English.