Lingue e parlanti dell’Abissinia precoloniale: testimonianze etnolinguistiche nei resoconti di viaggio italiani

Starting from the testimonies documented in a corpus of travel reports belonging to very different textual genres but united by their temporal collocation in the first forty years of the second half of the 19th century, the contribution proposes to focus on the images of Italian travellers in contact with the linguistic-communicative universes of pre-colonial Abyssinia. Representations, attitudes, meta- and epilinguistic annotations about the local repertory realities are analysed through the use of indicators deemed representative of subjectively perceived linguistic-communicative diversity and at the same time of the ethnolinguistic sensibilities of the time. The final aim is to outline the effects of the contact between Italian travellers and the languages and peoples of the Horn of Africa at a time still immune to, or barely touched by, the ideological and cultural conditioning that in the immediately following phases would lead to support policies inspired by principles of linguistic substitution.