Un impero sommerso: le royaume de l’argot

Marginals (vagrants, beggars, pedlars, carnies, crooks) are typically transnational, they do not know borders, they do not care about the laws and rules of the “others”; despite their differences, they are similar everywhere, they know and recognize each other; they have their own well-defined culture, clearly distinct from the cultures of the “others” (the sedentary groups); and they have their own language, jargon, equally not local, not regional, not national, but transnational. European (and world) jargons present a dense network of similarities, of common elements not at the superficial level of phonetics, which is localized, but at the deeper levels of the lexicon, semantics and linguistic mechanisms employed. So, jargon constitutes a sort of submerged, underground linguistic empire that flows in the slums of the language, beneath the diversity of national languages.