Multiliteracies and Allography in Medieval and Modern Italy

This chapter deals with the phenomenon of writing a language in the script of another, generally referred to as Allography (or Heterography), aiming to provide a theoretical framework for its understanding, on the basis of the Italo-Romance documentation. As a matter of fact, the Italo-Romance allographic corpus represents a perfect test bed for the study of the phenomenon. It comprises two main traditions, in Hebrew and Greek characters, and isolated texts in Arabic, Armenian, Ethiopic, and Syriac scripts, spanning from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, a period almost coinciding with the history of the Italian language. Consequently, it is by far the most varied allographic corpus in the whole Romance-speaking area and, more generally, in Western Europe. According to the general theme of the volume, allographies are considered within the wider framework of multiliteracies and multiscriptality, by applying notions and methodologies of contact linguistics and (historical) sociolinguistics to their analysis. Particular attention is payed to the causes of allography, ie. the reasons for which writers resort to minority scripts to write the language of the majority, and to the modes of ‘transcriptation’, that is the systematic transcoding of a language in a script that is not used for its writing.