Pantesco dialect

Pantesco is the Sicilian dialect of the island of Pantelleria, between Sicily and Tunisia. It is notable among Romance varieties for an unusually high degree of influence from Arabic, originating in an Arabic dialect similar to Maltese, which was spoken on the island until around the 19th century.

Many Arabic loanwords are found in Pantesco, for example hurrìhi ("nettle") and kardèna ("tick"). These terms frequently refer to a rural lifestyle, have negative connotations or are even limited to use with reference to animals, reflecting the low prestige of the extinct Arabic dialect. In such loans, the glottal fricative h (unusual for a Romance dialect) is preserved as a reflex of Arabic laryngeals h/x/ħ and sometimes even q.

In addition to lexical and phonological influence, the grammar of Pantesco shows Arabic influence in its formation of the periphrastic future and the pluperfect.

Pantesco uses unstressed subject pronoun clitics to form a continuous aspect, which is unique among Romance languages.

The dialect has undergone a process of Sicilianisation, by which it has lost most of its Arabic vocabulary, and is currently undergoing a language shift to Italian.

A dictionary of Pantesco was published by Giovanni Tropea in 1988.