FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

My favorite neologism is “famoso” meaning “hungry,” which I’ve heard from Arabic students learning Italian. This unofficial neologism emerges from the language acquisition process and represents a fascinating case of interlingual interference. The learner appears to have isolated the morphological component “-oso” (a productive Italian suffix meaning “full of” or “characterized by”) and combined it with “fame” (hunger), creating “famoso” to mean “full of hunger/hungry.” However, this conflicts with the existing Italian word “famoso” (famous), creating an interesting homophonic collision.
I find this fascinating because it shows how learners actively figure out morphological patterns – they’re not just making random mistakes, but following logical rules. It’s a perfect example of creative morphology in language acquisition, and as someone working with Arabic learners of Italian, I encounter these kinds of systematic “innovations” regularly.
It’s not documented anywhere officially, just something I’ve observed in my teaching and research experience.

I am a computational linguist specialized in the Arabic language. I hold a Ph.D. jointly awarded by Sapienza University of Rome (ISO Department) and Université Grenoble Alpes (LIDILEM and LIG laboratories). My doctoral thesis is entitled “Tunisian Arabizi: Linguistic Analyses and Corpus Building using Natural Language Processing.”

I served as a Post-Doc in Natural Language Processing at Université Grenoble Alpes, LIG laboratory, GETALP team, funded by the MIAI Institute in Grenoble. The project focused on extending the Tunisian Arabic processing tools developed during my doctoral research. Subsequently, I held a Post-Doc position in Dialectal Arabic Computational Linguistics at the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “A. Zampolli” (CNR-ILC) in Pisa, Italy, where I was involved in the CWALM project. I also worked as a Post-Doc at the Neuro-Psycho-Linguistic Laboratory at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, where my primary commitment was to the CLASS project, and I was responsible for tutorials (TD) for the “Outils d’analyse” course.

Currently, I am a researcher at the University of Sassari, where I am responsible for the Arabic Language and Literature course in the DiSSUF Department. I continue to enthusiastically pursue research on Arabic language varieties through computational tools. In particular, I am still collaborating with the LNPL laboratory (where I am now an Associate Member) on language acquisition projects and participating in the RABITA project (funded by PNRR), which aims to create digital environments for Arabic language learning through digitized texts of Arabic literature, exploring new methodological applications in Arabic didactics.