Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa brought the Italian language into close contact with the native Semitic (i.e., Tigrinya; Amharic; Arabic) and Cushitic (i.e. Oromo; Somali) languages of local East African communities for sixty-five years. Silenced Lexicons brings attention to this understudied case of language contact by identifying the linguistic phenomena it generated, such as the development of pidgin languages, language policies, and multilingualism among indigenous African populations. By applying methods from the interdisciplinary field of historical sociolinguistics to surviving written materials from Italy’s colonial past, my dissertation foregrounds a much-overlooked figure in modern Italian studies: the Italophone East African colonial subject. I will devote my fellowship in Rome to finding and analyzing didactic language texts, telegraphs, and epistolary materials from this period which both substantiate their existence and explain their persistent omission from scholarly discourse.