The Language of Things: Agricultural, Culinary, and Musical Terms in Ugo Ferrandi’s (1851–1933) Somali Notebooks

This article offers a linguistic and ethnographic analysis of a set of indigenous terms recorded by the Italian explorer Ugo Ferrandi (1851-1933) during his two-year stay in the town of Lugh (Luuq), southern Somalia, where he served as commander of an Italian outpost during the second Bottego expedition (1895–1897). The study specifically focuses on terms related to agriculture, cooking, and music—three core domains of material culture. Despite limitations posed by the absence of a standardised orthography and Ferrandi’s lack of formal training in local languages, his notebooks provide rare lexical insights into pre-standard Somali and the multilingual environment of the Jubba region, where Somali (including the Maay variety), Oromo, Swahili, and other languages coexisted. Drawing on philological analysis, early bilingual dictionaries, contemporaneous travel accounts, and oral testimonies collected in Somalia during the 1980s, the study addresses issues of dialectal variation, orthographic practices, and semantic shifts. These findings contribute to a broader project aimed at developing a glossary of pre-standard Somali terminology, intended as a resource for linguists, anthropologists, and scholars of African material culture, and to facilitate the recovery and dissemination of this important yet understudied primary source.