Between the end of the 19th century and the 1930s, Italy created a colonial empire that included Libya, Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia. These last three countries, after the Ethiopia conquest in 1935, were incorporated into a territory called AOI (Italian East Africa). Italian colonialism, which ended after second world warthe Second World War, left significant traces in cultural heritage of colonized countries. However, linguistically there are no strong roots in all four countries. This is evident in the absence of the adoption of the Italian language as an official or second language, as well as a language for public or private use among the local population. Palermo records a single case of Italian-based hybrid speech born out of colonialism, Ethiopia’s foreign talk which could be considered a form of pidgin, without, however, leaving significant traces after the end of colonialism end.
The existing body of research on the reasons determining the scarce Italian linguistic rooting suggests that, besides the short duration of the colonial period, other possible causes exist. The most important seems to be the inadequate linguistic and educational policies adopted by the Italian government, despite the lack of controlled studies lack which compare the linguistic and educational policies adopted by the Italian colonial power and other colonial contexts. This thesis intends to determine the extent to which these policies affected the linguistic rooting in the former Italian colonies by employing a comparative mode of enquiry, which highlights similarities and differences between the linguistic and educational policies of the Italian government and those of the French and English colonies, in a territory whose insteadwhere the language of the colonists is strongly rooted. Understanding the linklinks and differencedifferences between the former and the latter policies helps to determine more specifically which aspects of the inadequate linguistic and educational policies’vepolicies have had the greatest impact on Italy's precarious linguistic heritage in Africa.