Italian Pidgin in Eritrea (or Italian Eritrean, as is often called) was a pidgin language used in Italian Eritrea when Eritrea was a colony of Italy (and until the 1970s in the Asmara region).[1]
This pidgin (sometimes also called "Simplified Pidgin Italian of Eritrea") started to be created at the end of the 19th century and was fully developed in the 1930s. It had similarities with the Mediterranean Lingua Franca.
Lingua Franca also seems to have affected other languages. Italian Pidgin in Eritrea, for instance, displayed some remarkable similarities with it, in particular the use of Italian participles as past or perfective markers. It seems reasonable to assume that these similarities have been transmitted through Italian "foreigner talk" stereotypes.[2]
In 1940 nearly all the local population of Asmara (the capital of Eritrea) spoke the Eritrean Pidgin Italian when communicating with the Italian colonists.
Until the late 1970s this pidgin was still in use by some native Eritreans, but currently it is considered extinguished (even if a few old Eritreans still understand it in Asmara).
About the Italian Eritrean Habte-Mariam wrote that: “[…] at the initial stage of their contact […] It seems likely that the Italians simplified the grammar of the language they used with underlings at this stage, but they did not borrow vocabulary and grammatical forms from Amharic and Tigrinya, since it does not show up in the 'simplified Italian' used today”. [3] Habte wrote that it was used not only between native Eritreans and Italians, but also between different tribes in Ethiopia and Eritrea.
The linguists G. Gilbert & Lionel Bender called this pidgin a "Simplified Italian of Eritrea" and wrote that:
"Simplified Italian of Eritrea" is definitely a pidgin; it is described by Habte as a “relatively variable form of Italian” (1976:179). Habte’s account of its sociolinguistic setting (1976: 170-4) and what we know of recent Eritrean history make it quite clear that it is not likely to become a creole, and in fact seems likely to die out within the next generation or two.[4]
For them the Simplified Italian of Eritrea "has basic SVO order; unmarked form is used for nonspecific; stare and ce (from Italian) as locatives".[5]
Examples
The lexicon and syntaxes of the Italian Eritrean Pidgin was described by Saul Hoffmann in [6]
Examples:
luy andato lospεdale; in Italian: È andato all’ospedale (in English: he has gone to the hospital)
o bεrduto soldi ki tu dato bεr me; in Italian: ho perso i soldi che mi hai dato (in English: I have lost the money you gave me)
iyo non ce/aβere makkina; in Italian: non ho la macchina (in English: I don't have the car)
Current situation of Italian
Italian is still widely spoken and understood and remains a principal language in commerce and education in Eritrea; the capital city Asmara still has an Italian-language school since the colonial decades.[7] People born in Italy and who have children born in Italian Eritrea (who speak Italian and have formed communities in Eritrea) maintain associations of Italo-Eritreans in Italy.[8]
Nearly 10% of the population of the capital Asmara is still able in 2018 to understand Italian and some old Eritreans still speak some words and phrases in Italian, according to the Italian ambassador. He pinpointed that some Italian words are commonly used in the Eritrean language, like "pizza".
The Italian language that affirms in Eritrea during the twentieth century instead presents itself as a single whole, but remaining different from the languages spoken in the rest of the peninsula; it sounds like a regional variant and yet it can not be traced back to any of the Italian regions. It possesses typically northern Italian features such as the use of the s intervocalic sound, in words like casa, rosa, cosa, but perhaps the most distinctive trait I have observed in many Italian speakers born in Eritrea, or of bilingual Italian-Tigrine Eritreans, it is the articulation of sounds that tends to be guttural in the same way as the language spoken in Eritrea, the "Tigrinya". It is as if all the sounds moved from the front to the back of the palate; the effect on the mother tongue listener is surprising given that in Italy nobody speaks in this way. This phenomenon can be ascribed to the Tigrinya linguistic substratum for cases of bilingualism; in the case instead of the Italians born and raised in Eritrea - who do not speak Tigrinya - we can perhaps trace the ancient Eritrean nurses, probably bilingual, with whom Italian children spent a lot of time and from which they probably learned to pronounce the sounds in Italian. Another characteristic element is the elision of the final vowel to the first plural person of verbs such as 'essere' and 'avere': "siam pronti, abbiam fretta". It is still used today in some linguistic areas of Northern Italy even if at the ear of the third millennium it sounds vaguely nineteenth-century, not to mention literary; it was probably imposed in the initial phase of colonization and remained unchanged through the decades.
While phonology and intonation are affected by native Eritrean languages, including Tigrinya and Arabic, Eritrean Pidgin Italian is based on standard European form. The Italian lexicon in Eritrea has some loanwords of Tigrinya and Arabic origin (the latter especially includes Islamic terms). On the other hand, the Italian languages has given to the Tigrinya language many hundreds of loanwords.[10]
The "Asmara Caffe" on Harnet Avenue of Asmara is famous for Italian-style cappuccino and pastries. It has the italian word "caffe", that means 'coffee'
A pidgin, or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from several languages. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the country in which they reside.
A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form, and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fledged language with native speakers, all within a fairly brief period. While the concept is similar to that of a mixed or hybrid language, creoles are often characterized by a tendency to systematize their inherited grammar. Like any language, creoles are characterized by a consistent system of grammar, possess large stable vocabularies, and are acquired by children as their native language. These three features distinguish a creole language from a pidgin. Creolistics, or creology, is the study of creole languages and, as such, is a subfield of linguistics. Someone who engages in this study is called a creolist.
A lingua franca, also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups of people who do not share a native language or dialect, particularly when it is a third language that is distinct from both of the speakers' native languages.
Sango is the primary language spoken in the Central African Republic and also the co-official language of the country. It is used as a lingua franca across the country and had 450,000 native speakers in 1988. It also has 1.6 million second language speakers.
Portuguese creoles are creole languages which have Portuguese as their substantial lexifier. The most widely-spoken creoles influenced by Portuguese are Cape Verdean Creole, Guinea-Bissau Creole and Papiamento.
In addition to its classical and modern literary form, Malay had various regional dialects established after the rise of the Srivijaya empire in Sumatra, Indonesia. Also, Malay spread through interethnic contact and trade across the south East Asia Archipelago as far as the Philippines. That contact resulted in a lingua franca that was called Bazaar Malay or low Malay and in Malay Melayu Pasar. It is generally believed that Bazaar Malay was a pidgin, influenced by contact among Malay, Hokkien, Portuguese, and Dutch traders.
Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact with and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. Language contact can occur at language borders, between adstratum languages, or as the result of migration, with an intrusive language acting as either a superstratum or a substratum.
In linguistics, relexification is a mechanism of language change by which one language changes much or all of its lexicon, including basic vocabulary, with the lexicon of another language, without drastically changing the relexified language's grammar. The term is principally used to describe pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages.
West African Pidgin English, also known as Guinea Coast Creole English, is a West African pidgin language lexified by English and local African languages. It originated as a language of commerce between British and African slave traders during the period of the transatlantic slave trade. As of 2017, about 75 million people in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana and Equatorial Guinea used the language.
The Tigre people are an ethnic group indigenous to Eritrea. They mainly inhabit the lowlands and northern highlands of Eritrea.
The main languages spoken in Eritrea are Tigrinya, Tigre, Kunama, Bilen, Nara, Saho, Afar, and Beja. The country's working languages are Tigrinya, Arabic, English.
In linguistics, a koine or koiné language or dialect is a standard or common dialect that has arisen as a result of the contact, mixing, and often simplification of two or more mutually intelligible varieties of the same language.
A lexifier is the language that provides the basis for the majority of a pidgin or creole language's vocabulary (lexicon). Often this language is also the dominant, or superstrate language, though this is not always the case, as can be seen in the historical Mediterranean Lingua Franca. In mixed languages, there are no superstrates or substrates, but instead two or more adstrates. One adstrate still contributes the majority of the lexicon in most cases, and would be considered the lexifier. However, it is not the dominant language, as there are none in the development of mixed languages, such as in Michif.
According to the theory of monogenesis in its most radical form, all pidgins and creole languages of the world can be ultimately traced back to one linguistic variety. This idea was first formulated by Hugo Schuchardt in the late 19th century and popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Taylor (1961) and Thompson (1961). It assumes that some type of pidgin language, dubbed West African Pidgin Portuguese, based on Portuguese was spoken from the 15th to 18th centuries in the forts established by the Portuguese on the West African coast. This variety was the starting point of all the pidgin and creole languages. This would explain to some extent why Portuguese lexical items can be found in many creoles, but more importantly, it would account for the numerous grammatical similarities shared by such languages.
The Mediterranean Lingua Franca, or Sabir, was a contact language, or languages, that were used as a lingua franca in the Mediterranean Basin from the 11th to the 19th centuries. April McMahon describes Sabir as a "fifteenth century proto-pidgin" and "a relic of the original Lingua Franca, a medieval language used by Mediterranean traders and by the Crusaders." Operstein and McMahon categorize Sabir and "Lingua Franca" as separate but related languages.
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