Simplified Italian of Ethiopia: Difference between revisions

The “Simplified Italian of Ethiopia” or “SIE” (also called “Pidgin Italian of Ethiopia“) was a pidgin language used by some Ethiopians in the 20th century to speak in a form of Italian.^[1] It was used mainly in the north of Ethiopia (Tigrinya and Amhara regions) and in the capital, Addis Ababa, when Ethiopia was part of the Italian empire from 1936 up to World War II^[2] It remained in use among some old Ethiopians and Eritreans until the 2020s.

SIE, according to linguist Habte-Mariam Marcos in 1977, was a relatively variable form of Italian, simply modified in pronunciation, limited in vocabulary and sharply reduced in grammar.^[3] In SIE there it is lack of articles and full use of infinitives, while SIE’s morphology and syntax use little subordination and plenty of parataxis.

The phonology of the Pidgin Italian of Ethiopia is characterized by huge interference from Tigrinya and Amharic, the two Semitic languages spoken respectively in southern Eritrea and central northern Ethiopia by the majority of the population. 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.

According to Mauro Tosco, Tigrinya has borrowed most of its automotive technical vocabulary through SIE; for example, Italian “molla” (‘spring’ in English) is moollo, “pompa” (‘pump’) is boomba, and “freno” (‘brake’) is fariino. Furthermore, the Italian language is very present in Amharic in the lexical fields of contemporary food (names of dishes and pastries) and automobiles (what must be learned to get a driver’s licence).

Hussein Abdu Ramadan wrote that most of the loanwords from Italian had adopted Arabic grammatical rules for tense formation and inflection for number or gender.

Historian E. Aiello thinks that in 1940 the percentage of the local population able to speak SIE was 26% in Addis Ababa and nearly 10% in northern Ethiopia. In 2000, fewer than 100 old Ethiopians can understand and/or speak SIE. Indeed, according to Hoffman Samuel, the Pidgin Italian of Ethiopia has the following characteristics: “The SIE has this characteristic: The Italian phonological system is rearranged, also on the basis of the interference of the local languages.”

• Bender, Lionel. Pidgin and Creole languages. University of Hawaii Press. Hawaii, 1987. ISBN 9780824882150
• Habte Mariam Marcos.”Ethiopian Pidgin Italian: Other languages of Ethiopia” Oxford University. Oxford, 1976
• Hussein, Ramada Abdu. “Italian loanwords in colloquial Libyan Arabic as spoken in the Tripoli region”. University of Arizona. Tucson, 1988
• Tripodi, Paolo. “The Colonial Legacy in Somalia and in the Italian Empire”. St. Martin’s P Inc. New York, 1999.