“SERIES IX” OF THE REGIA DOGANA OF FOGGIA: MULTILINGUALISM AND PLURISTYLISM IN SOME PROCEDURAL DOCUMENTS FROM THE 18th CENTURY

Sa？etak The Regia Dogana della mena delle Pecore was one of the most important institutions of the ancient Kingdom of Naples between the 15th and 19th centuries. At present, about a thousand trial files are kept in the “serie IX” of the Foggia’s Archives fonds dedicated to the centuries-old activity of its court: they concern crimes mostly committed in the area of the Capitanata between 1770 and 1806. This work is based on a corpus consisting of 35 trial files belonging to the above-mentioned series and it aims to highlight the peculiarities of officers’ writings, which are characterised both by the coexistence of Latin and Italian, and by the uses and forms of antithetic linguistic varieties. On the one side, in fact, some forms and uses are specific to bureaucratic Italian; on the other side, some forms and uses are specific to italiano dei semicolti. Two depositions for a theft and an aggression, and some examples related to nominal, adjectival and verbal forms are analysed, and the results show how and to what extent oral varieties influenced writing