Ernesto Giammarco e la questione dei longobardismi nell’abruzzese

The article aims to explore the longobardismi in abruzzese dialect, through the Ernesto Giammarco’s works; his essays on language and Abruzzo dialects were merged in a volume published posthumously in 1994 with the title Il dominio longobardo in Abruzzo (Rome, Gei). The work collects and elaborates three articles of Giammarco, appeared between 1984 and 1986, in the journal Aprutium. On other occasions, however, it is possible to find hints and insights on the “longobardizzazione”, from a linguistic and historical point of view, that took place, in particular, in two directions: one inward, i.e. towards the Aquila basin, chronologically earlier, and the other one to the Adriatic; the consolidation of the Langobards presence occurred at a military level especially thanks to the construction of fortifications. In his essays Giammarco showed that the Langobard vocabulary about toponymy, geonomastica, names, personal, local and agricultural lexicon, can be split into three sections: nomenclature of the conquest, nomenclature of the settlement, nomenclature of the socio-cultural and administrative life. Through a review of Giammarco’s main publications, we will try to emphasize the original contributions given by the scholar on this topic