Parole “senza confini”: il caso dei gerghi storici di calderai in Italia

This paper aims to address the theme of ‘boundary’ through the geo-linguistic study of historical cants of tinkers in Italy. After introducing the dynamics that characterized the relation between the lexicon of historical cants and the mobility of different groups of cant speakers, a description of the geo-linguistic theory of the area gregale di categoria formulated by Ugo Pellis in the early 1930s is then provided. The results obtained from later applications of Pellis’-theory are then presented, which more thoroughly identify the lexical correspondences among tinkers’cants in central-southern Italy, as well as the divergences observed with the cant varieties of tinkers from the northern Alps. An analysis is then conducted to identify a relation between the specific lexicon of tinkers and various historical cants of different trades from the central-southern Italy, before the attempt to outline a potential linguistic area based on lexical convergences observed among tinkers’cants from the northern Alps. Finally, the hypothesis of lexical connection involving all tinkers’cants is proposed, highlighting the continuity with the argotic lexicon of the 15th-century mendicants (beggars) documented in Teseo Pini’s Speculum cerretanorum