Abstract
Although Italian is no longer (and has not been for a long time) an active player among the languages of the Horn of Africa, the contribution of Italian to the lexicon of the local languages has been substantial. In all countries that from the second part of the nineteenth century until the end of World War II were directly under Italian rule, semantic fields ranging from mechanics to cuisine and from housing to clothing are replete with Italian loans (overwhelmingly nouns). Italian is not an official language in any country of the area; instead, a numerous and active Italian community played a central role in economic life. As a consequence, Italianisms tend to occur in low registers and in semantic fields belonging to everyday’s modern lexicon, where they face competition from English and Arabic. A central role in the diffusion of Italian loans was played geographically by Eritrea and linguistically by Tigrinya, as can be easily seen by the overall similarity of the loans across widely diverging languages of different language groups.
