Pantesco dialect
Pantesco is the Sicilian dialect of the island of Pantelleria, between Sicily and Tunisia. It is notable among Romance varieties for an unusually high degree of influence from Arabic, originating in an Arabic dialect similar to Maltese, which was spoken on the island until around the 19th century and is substratal to Pantesco.
Many Arabic loanwords are found in Pantesco, for example hurrìhi and kardèna. These terms frequently refer to a rural lifestyle, have negative connotations or are even limited to use with reference to animals, reflecting the low prestige of the extinct Arabic dialect. In such loans, the glottal fricative /h/ is preserved as a reflex of Arabic laryngeals /h/, /x/, /ħ/ and sometimes even /q/.
In addition to lexical and phonological influence, the grammar of Pantesco shows Arabic influence in its formation of the periphrastic future and the pluperfect. Pantesco uses unstressed subject pronoun clitics to form a continuous aspect, which is unique among Romance languages. The dialect has undergone a process of Sicilianisation, by which it has lost most of its Arabic vocabulary, and is currently undergoing a language shift to Italian. A dictionary of Pantesco was published by Giovanni Tropea in 1988.
History
Pantelleria was occupied from the Neolithic period, and in classical times Punic, Greek and Latin were spoken on the island. However, no trace of a substrate originating in these languages is detectable in Pantesco, as it appears that the island was forcibly depopulated, through massacre or deportation, when it was conquered by the Aghlabids in 840.The Arabic dialect of Pantelleria
It is likely that Pantelleria was uninhabited for a period of time before being resettled by Arab Muslims at some point prior to 1127. It is not known whether the settlers initially spoke a variety of Sicilian or Maghrebi Arabic, as no written record of the dialect exists and the process of resettlement of the island was not documented.Following the Norman conquest of Pantelleria in 1127, the island's Muslim Arab population came under the control of the Kingdom of Sicily. This placed them under the government of a Christian bureaucracy, which used both Arabic and Greek as languages of administration, although this was changed to Latin around the turn of the 13th century. The christianisation and latinisation of the population on the island was initially much slower than on Malta, with the Islamic faith definitely surviving until the 15th century. Likewise, the rural areas of Pantelleria remained entirely Arabic-speaking throughout the medieval period. However, the port and castle were colonised by merchants and officials from Sicily, who were later joined by others from Genoa and Catalonia. The castle was therefore Christian and increasingly Romance in its language, which, due to rough terrain, did not spread to the isolated settlements of the rural population.
During the 16th century, Pantelleria was prey to attacks not only by Barbary corsairs, who treated it the same as any other Christian territory, but also Christian pirates, for whom the inhabitants' Arabic speech rendered them legitimate targets. In 1599, the island was visited by the bishop of Mazara, who found that young people still wore Moorish clothing and spoke Arabic. He ordered that these customs should cease, and that the population should adopt Sicilian customs. The rural areas of the island were still Arabophone in 1670, when a visiting French captain was forced to use a Maltese interpreter to converse with the population because "the language of Malta is the same as that of Pantelleria".
The shift to Sicilian
Pantesco is descended from the Sicilian dialects of Trapani, the nearest point on the Sicilian mainland. The process by which the Arab population adopted Sicilian is not well-documented, but Maltese linguist Joseph Brincat states that the conversion of the island to Christianity and the emigration of mudéjars who refused to convert, alongside pirate raids, were contributory factors. It is also possible that official linguistic policy favoured the abandonment of Arabic language features in the 19th and 20th century.French historian Henri Bresc describes a process of Latinisation of the population, by which speakers of different Romance varieties from Spain and Italy congregated on the island, producing a new oral culture which absorbed vocabulary and habits from the Arabic population into the new Pantesco reality. On the other hand, Brincat views the process of language shift as a gradual incorporation of Trapanese Sicilian words into the island's Arabic speech, until it was more Sicilian than Arabic. This would, in his view, explain the fact that the Arabic vocabulary is limited to "the elementary activities of daily life", particularly farming.
Although monolingual speakers are documented at the end of the 17th century, no later direct evidence of Arabic on the island exists. Brincat suggests that the population switched to Sicilian during the 19th century. Despite the disappearance of Arabic, its influence on Pantesco was significant, leaving effects on its vocabulary, grammar and phonology, which made it the most Arabised of all the Romance languages.
Modern period
Pantesco in the 20th century underwent a process of de-Arabisation, becoming gradually more similar to mainland Sicilian dialects. Several factors contributed to this. The construction of roads on the island reduced the isolation of the rural areas and brought conservative countryside speakers into contact with the more Sicilianised dialect of the port. In addition, prior to the Second World War, a prison colony existed on Pantelleria, and Italian military personnel were stationed there. These outsiders were agents of Italianisation on the island.A record of the pre-war dialect exists in a 1937 dissertation by Maria Valenza, the first study conducted on the language of the island. By the 1950s, the Sicilianisation of Pantesco was extensive, with much Arabic vocabulary already lost. In 1964-1967, Anna Rosa D'Ancona carried out fieldwork on the island, which would be used as the source material Giovanni Tropea's 1988 Lessico del dialetto di Pantelleria, the main source for study of the dialect.
A process of further Italianisation began in the late 20th century, with younger inhabitants of Pantelleria abandoning their mother tongue in favour of regional Italian. Speakers on the island around the turn of the century associated Italian with progress and economic advancement, and Pantesco with a backwards rural lifestyle. Brincat writes that, as of 2011, no literature had been published in Pantesco, reflecting the low status of the language.
Literature
Although little has been published in Pantesco, the dialect has a tradition of poetry. The local Italian-language press occasionally publish poems in Pantesco, as well as collections of sayings with translations and explanations.In 2018, a collection of poetry in Pantesco, Eco di suoni panteschi, was published in Brescia by Beatrice Cornado, a daughter of emigrants from the island. The poet Lillo di Bonsulton, who died in 2022, published many poems in the local newspapers, and was well-known on the island. In memory of Bonsulton, the local council of Pantelleria inaugurated the annual Premio Lillo di Bonsulton, a poetry prize with categories for poetry written in Italian and Pantesco.
Phonology
Vowels
Stressed vowels
Pantesco has five stressed vowels, which are the same as those in other dialects of Sicilian.| Front | Central | Back | |
| Close | |||
| Close-mid | |||
| Open-mid | |||
| Open |
In addition to this, exists as a possible allophone of /ɔ/ in stressed syllables, and the close-mid can replace /ɛ/.
| Spelling | Pronunciation | Allophone | English |
| bbònu | /b:ɔnʊ/ | 'good' | |
| tèmpu | /tɛmpʊ/ | 'time' |
Unstressed vowels
In unstressed syllables, three vowels are possible in Pantesco: /ɪ/, /a/ and /ʊ/. Allophones of two of these exist; /ɪ/ can be pronounced as while /ʊ/ can become .| Spelling | Pronunciation | Allophone | English |
| bbònu | /b:ɔnʊ/ | 'good' | |
| picciuttèddhi | /pɪtʃʊt:ɛɖːʐɪ/ | 'boys' |
Consonants
| Bilabial | Labio- dental | Alveolar | Palato- alveolar | Retroflex | Palatal | Velar | Labio- velar | Laryngeal | |
| Plosive | |||||||||
| Affricative | |||||||||
| Fricative | |||||||||
| Nasal | |||||||||
| Lateral | |||||||||
| Trill | |||||||||
| Approximant |
The phoneme /h/ is unusual in Romance languages. In Pantesco it is used exclusively in words borrowed from the Arabic dialect formerly spoken on the island, replacing the Arabic phonemes /h/,, and. Writing in 2011, Joseph Brincat states that /h/ is a rural pronunciation which has now been replaced by /c/, a feature previously characteristic of the dialect of the town of Pantelleria. Alice Idone still included it as a feature of rural speech in 2017.