Measuring the integration of the young foreign population in a new settling region of Southern Italy through the command and use of the language

In the last two decades Italy is increasingly taking a multi-ethnic face as a crossroads of peoples and cultures thanks to the gradual and widespread stabilization with a rising contribution of the foreign population in defining the socio-economic, cultural and political set-up of the country.
In recent years there has been a substantial increase of foreign students: in fact, in the last six years, their number doubled reaching an incidence of foreign students on the total school population equal to 7.9%. With particular reference to the Southern regions, we can point out the case of Apulia characterized by a strong youth component and, consequently, by an important number of foreign students. Other than official observations conducted mainly at a national level, data used for this contribution will be those of a field survey organized ad hoc, conducted in collaboration with the Regional School Division and financed by the European Fund for the Integration. Thanks to the several information collected, it has been possible to find out, beyond quantitative aspects, qualitative features very useful for a more complete phenomenon interpretation. Among the different aspects we would like to put the emphasis on the linguistic integration, basing on the consideration that language is the vehicle for a full socio-economic integration.