Nomadi poliglotti

Polyglot nomads Jargon speaking peripatetic groups were continuously in contact with differ- ent people who spoke different languages and dialects. Therefore, they were necessarily polyglot. Their linguistic knowledge was very large and included local dialects, regional varieties, national languages, both in oral and in writ- ten form, because the members of marginal groups were able to read and write and, as they "sold words" to survive, had some contact with the literary languages as well. A good example of such conditions is provided by the au- tobiography of the Italian barker Arturo Frizzi (Mantua 1864 - Cremona 1940). He was able to speak different dialects in the inns, to hold political speech in literary Italian and to sell his poor-quality wares in Montenegro speaking in Serbo-Croatian. The plurilingualism of the marginal groups is well reflected by their jargons in which there are many loanwords from different European languages and dialects, but also from Romani and Latin. The rich linguistic knowledge of the members of jargon speaking marginal groups recalls that of the hunter gatherers, who are able to speak many languages of the sedentary communities, as documented by many field-studies especially in Africa. On the contrary sedentary communities’ members ignore the languages of the hunter gatherers, because they despise such languages and do not care to learn them.