On the 16th April a book on the Maltese terminology of fishing and navigation will be launched at the Italian Cultural Institute, Valletta, at 6.30 pm.

The book presents the answers given by Nazzarenu Cuschieri, a full-time fisherman from Saint Julians, to the questionnaire of the Atlante Linguistico della Sicilia, marine section. The Linguistic Atlas of Sicily aims to save for posterity the dialectal terminology of all the traditional aspects and activities of Sicily, and at present the team is working on the terminology of fishing.This project aims to update the results of the Linguistic Atlas of the Mediterranean which were carried out in the Fifties and Sixties, for which Joseph Aquilina filled in the questionnaire for Malta (published as Nomi di pesci, ecc. in 1969) and Giovanni Ruffino carried out the research for Sicily (published in 1977). Joseph Brincat had carried out a comparative study which he mentioned in his linguistic history of Malta (2000, 2004, 2011).

This time the points of investigation went up from five to 20 in Sicily and include Malta. The methodology is also different because instead of basing the answers on books and scattered information, this time only one fisherman has been interviewed in each fishing village.

The questions are now 582 instead of 810, but ethnotexts have been included, that is free conversation about each fisherman’s experiences and opinions, making the inquiry more true to life.

Nazzarenu is now retired but his testimony has been one of the most interesting of all. Although he has never studied Italian (in fact he hardly got any schooling because his father wanted him to work full-time on his boat since age 9) he understood Elena D’Avenia’s questions and answered in a Sicilianate form of Italian, which he picked up naturally through conversations with Sicilian fisherman at sea and on his visits to Lampedusa, Pantelleria and the fishing villages of southeast Sicily up to Catania. His sentences were not always grammatical but very intelligibile, and thus throw light on language acquisition in a practical context.

Professor Giovanni Ruffino, Director of the Centro Studi Filologici e Linguistici Siciliani and promoter of the ALS will explain the project’s aims, and Elena D’Avenia and Professor Joseph Brincat will comment on the Maltese terminology.

Photos Top: Nazzareno and Elena, and below – sample pages that show how the definitive publication of the linguistic atlas will look like.

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