Academic Folio

Hi, I'm Luigi.

I'm a linguistic anthropologist. I study how people construct identity, belonging, and community through language practices — what we say, how we say it, what we do with words in the flow of everyday interaction.

I recently completed my PhD in Asian, African, and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Naples "L'Orientale". My dissertation, Shaping Communities Through Language Practices, Ideologies, and Mobility, combines long-term ethnography with digital and quantitative methods to analyze narrative traditions across different scales. I conducted fieldwork in Indonesia and the Middle East, using Indonesian, Malay, and Arabic to access materials and oral narratives often overlooked in studies of diaspora and Islam in Southeast Asia.

My work sits at the intersection of sociolinguistics, anthropology, linguistics, and history. I'm always at risk of being filed under Southeast Asian studies — because I study communities in Indonesia — or under Middle East studies — because the diaspora I work with has Yemeni origins. But that's precisely the point of my research: to refuse the separation between these two worlds and show how they are connected, historically and today. One world that looks toward the Middle East, Islam, the Arabic language, the Mediterranean, and the Gulf; another that views Southeast Asia as a branch of contemporary China, a Magna Graecia of India, or a world of its own. I try to make visible the bridges that link these two geographies — not so distant after all.

I combine the methods of language documentation with the goals of linguistic anthropology, pairing traditional tools with emerging digital humanities approaches — trying to make space for the oral histories of multilingual subaltern voices.

I love and hate large language models and speech-to-text software, but I reserve my most complex feelings for ELAN.

I speak Italian, English, Indonesian, Arabic, French, and a bit of Thai.

When I'm not transcribing recordings or thinking about discourse particles, I might be taking a programming course to build an app and leave academia, working on an online dictionary, planning my next fieldwork, or just playing music.