| Simplified Italian of Somalia | |
|---|---|
| Pidgin italiano in Somalia Somali-Italian | |
| Native to | Italian Somaliland |
| Region | Somalia |
| Ethnicity | Somalians, Italian Somalians |
| Era | 19th to late-20th centuries |
Italian-based pidgin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| IETF | crp-SO |
Simplified Italian of Somalia is an Italian-based Pidgin that developed in Italian Somaliland during the Italian Colonial Period. The Pidgin was very similar to Italian Eritrean Pidgin [1] and used mostly in the capital region of Mogadishu as well as other Italianized towns such as Genale or Villabruzi
The Italian language began to spread throughout Somalia during the Colonial period which lasted from 1889 until 1960. Italian was quickly picked up by the local inhabitants and started to become a part of daily life. There were even several newspapers and radio channels in the Italian language. [2]
However, the Standard Italian used by the government and crown of Italy differed from the variety used by the inhabitants of Somalia due to the original linguistic differences between Italian and local languages, as well as the geographic isolation of the new pidgin from the Italian Peninsula. This pidgin was used by nearly 2/3 of the native population in 1940, according to historian Epifanio Ajello
Many Somali-Italian words were orthographically altered to accommodate Somali phonetics. Below is an example of some Italian words translated into Italo-Somali demonstrating this phenomenon. Note the doubling of vowels, usage of consonants such as W and J not used in standard Italian and transformation of feminine ending words into masculine ending.
| Pasta | Baasto |
| Giugno | Juunyo |
| Visita | Wiisito |
Academic historian Banti [3] is probably the only existing analysis of Italian as spoken in Somalia based upon a corpus of actual sentences. Banti's corpus was written in 1990 and was very small and drawn from two speakers only, namely, two Somali women employed as house workers by Italian expatriates in the eighties. A simplified and unstable form of Italian -according to Banfi- very probably continued to be in use among uneducated Somali when entering in contact with the Italian community. It is also possible that its use was actually boosted in the seventies and eighties: formal education in Italian was no longer available, while the number of educated Somali of the older generations (often speaking “good” Italian) and of Italian residents (many of them with a certain command of Somali) was slowly decreasing.
At the same time, there was a burgeoning number of Italian expatriates working in technical cooperation and education, many of them spending relatively short periods of time in the country.......Certainly the points in common between this "simplified Italian of Somalia" and the "Restructured Italian Pidgin of Eritrea" are striking: is there a common origin? This seems to be the answer adumbrated by Banti, who hints at a "common tradition” rather than to "parallel developments” without further elaboration. One can hypothesize that the Eritrean troops deployed to Somalia by the Italian authorities during the colonial times may have acted as middlemen in the acquisition of a modicum of Italian on the part of Somalis, especially in Mogadishu.
