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Polyglot nomads Jargon speaking peripatetic groups were continuously in contact with differ- ent people who spoke different languages and dialects. Therefore, they were necessarily polyglot. Their linguistic knowledge was very large and included local dialects, regional varieties, national languages, both in oral and in writ- ten form, because the members of marginal groups were able to read and write and, as they "sold words" to survive, had some contact with the literary languages as well. A good example of such conditions is provided by the au- tobiography of the Italian barker Arturo Frizzi (Mantua 1864 - Cremona 1940). He was able to speak different dialects in the inns, to hold political speech in literary Italian and to sell his poor-quality wares in Montenegro speaking in Serbo-Croatian. The plurilingualism of the marginal groups is well reflected by their jargons in which there are many loanwords from different European languages and dialects, but also from Romani and Latin. The rich linguistic knowledge of the members of jargon speaking marginal groups recalls that of the hunter gatherers, who are able to speak many languages of the sedentary communities, as documented by many field-studies especially in Africa. On the contrary sedentary communities' members ignore the languages of the hunter gatherers, because they despise such languages and do not care to learn them.

Parody is quite usual in folksongs, and marks their long history: old songs are continuously re-used, keeping the same music and changing the words, adapting them to new situations. If we trace back the links in the chain of parody, and track down the patterns of the songs, we can locate the anthropologically relevant infor- mation – namely the cultural environment from which they originated. We can thus show that the miners' songs are parodies of earlier songs of war, of military songs, and of songs sung by outcasts, proving that mar- ginal culture is the historical background of the culture of the miners, and more generally of working culture.