Huellas lingüísticas del desgaste de la L1 en el siglo XVIII

The study analyzes Italian–Spanish linguistic contact in the eighteenth century on the basis of letters and documents preserved in the Archivio di Stato dell'Aquila. It focuses on the problem of describing how long-term immersion in Spain influenced the Italian writing of Blas (Biagio) Dragonet, an Italian-speaking military officer who lived in Badajoz, and how that influence is reflected in phenomena of interference, transfer, and code-switching.Among the aims of the study are the contextualization of episodes from Italian–Spanish families whose texts reveal real bilingual practices, and the linguistic examination of four Italian letters written by Dragonet and his circle.The methodology combines a sociolinguistic and historical-philological approach, drawing on classical theories of language contact and on the model of communicative immediacy/distance. The analysis covers graphic, phonetic, morphosyntactic, and lexical variation, as well as paleographic features. The results show systematic Spanish interference in Dragonet's Italian writing: simplification of geminate consonants, vowel oscillations, lexical and syntactic calques, Spanish-like use of prepositions, hybrid neologisms, and instances of code-switching. The letters reveal greater competence in Spanish-the language of everyday and administrative use—and signs of L1 attrition, visible above all in the difficulty of maintaining formal registers in Italian.