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.
[3] However, no trace of a substrate originating in these languages is detectable in Pantesco, as it appears that the island was forcibly depopulated, through massacre or deportation, when it was conquered by the Aghlabids in 840.
[5] It is not known whether the settlers initially spoke a variety of Siculo-Arabic or Maghrebi Arabic, as no written record of the dialect exists and the process of resettlement of the island was not documented.
[4][5] Following the Norman conquest of Pantelleria in 1127, the island's Muslim Arab population came under the control of the Kingdom of Sicily.
[6] This placed them under the government of a Christian bureaucracy, which used both Arab and Greek as languages of administration, although this was changed to Latin around the turn of the 13th century.
[6] The christianisation and latinisation of the population on the island was initially much slower than on Malta, with the Islamic faith definitely surviving until the 15th century.
[4] The castle was therefore Christian and increasingly Romance in its language, which, due to rough terrain did, not spread to the isolated settlements of the rural population.
[4] In 1599, the island was visited by the bishop of Mazara, who found that young people still wore Moorish clothing and spoke Arabic.
[5][4] The rural areas of the island were still Arabophone in 1670, when a visiting French captain was forced to use a Maltese interpreter to converse with the population because "the language of Malta is the same as that of Pantelleria".
[5] The process by which the Arab population adopted Sicilian is not well-documented, but Maltese linguist Joseph Brincat states that the conversion of the island to Christianity and the emigration of mudéjars who refused to convert, alongside pirate raids, were contributory factors.
[5] Despite the disappearance of Arabic, its influence on Pantesco was significant, leaving effects on its vocabulary, grammar and phonology, which made it the most Arabised Sicilian dialect.
The construction of roads on the island reduced the isolation of the rural areas and brought conservative countryside speakers into contact with the more Sicilianised dialect of the port.
[5] In addition, prior to the Second World War, a prison colony existed on Pantelleria, and Italian military personnel were stationed there.
[5] A record of the pre-war dialect exists in a 1937 dissertation by Maria Valenza, the first study conducted on the language of the island.
[5] A process of further Italianisation began in the late 20th century, with younger inhabitants of Pantelleria abandoning their mother tongue in favour of regional Italian.
[5] Speakers on the island around the turn of the century associated Italian with progress and economic advancement, and Pantesco with a backwards rural lifestyle.
[3] Writing in 2011, Joseph Brincat states that /h/ is a rural pronunciation which has now been replaced by /c/, a feature previously characteristic of the dialect of the town of Pantelleria (u paìsi "the village" in Pantesco).
The definite article in Sicilian parallels that of other South Italian varieties, in that it only differentiates between masculine and feminine nouns in the singular.
[10] The present perfect tense is almost completely absent, with Brincat stating it is only used to describe frequently repeated actions which have the potential to reoccur in future.
[10] A full discussion of these verbs can be found in Giovanni Tropea's 1988 dictionary and a summary in a 2018 paper by Loporcaro, Kägi and Gardani.
[8][10] However, it has a parallel in Maltese, which suggests the structure originates in the Arabic dialect spoken on the island prior to the population's adoption of Sicilian.
[5][8] As well as using a gerund and the verb to be to form a progressive aspect, as in Italian and Spanish, Pantesco uses clitics based on personal pronouns.
[4][3][5] These occur in Pantesco to avoid initial consonant clusters, which are found in Sicilian but would have been difficult to pronounce for Arabic speakers.
For example, the Sicilian blusa ("blouse") became Pantesco bilùsa, frenu ("brake") > firènu, creta ("chalk/clay") > kirìta, cravatta ("tie") > kurvàta, precìso ("precise, exactly") > pirčìsu, trottola ("spinning top") > tòrtula.