Sicilian

Status

Sicilian is spoken by most inhabitants of Sicily and by emigrant populations around the world. The latter are found in the countries that attracted large numbers of Sicilian immigrants during the course of the past century or so, especially the United States (specifically in the Gravesend and Bensonhurst neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York City, and in Buffalo and Western New York State), Canada (especially in Montreal, Toronto and Hamilton), Australia, Venezuela and Argentina. During the last four or five decades, large numbers of Sicilians were also attracted to the industrial zones of Northern Italy and areas of the European Union.

Although the Sicilian language does not have official status (including in Sicily), in addition to the standard Sicilian of the medieval Sicilian school, academics have developed a standardized form. Such efforts began in the mid-19th century when Vincenzo Mortillaro published a comprehensive Sicilian language dictionary intended to capture the language universally spoken across Sicily in a common orthography. Later in the century, Giuseppe Pitrè established a common grammar in his Grammatica Siciliana (1875). Although it presents a common grammar, it also provides detailed notes on how the sounds of Sicilian differ across dialects.

In the 20th century, researchers at the Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani developed an extensive descriptivist orthography which aims to represent every sound in the natural range of Sicilian accurately. This system is also used extensively in the Vocabolario siciliano and by Gaetano Cipolla in his Learn Sicilian series of textbooks and by Arba Sicula in its journal.

In initially 2017, with an updated version in 2024 the nonprofit organisation Cademia Siciliana created an orthographic proposal to help to normalise the language's written form. This orthography was used by the organisation in their collaboration with Google to bring the Sicilian Language to Google Translate. Their "Manifesto" currently has been signed by many towns and cities of Sicily demanding official status for the language.[2] There are currently proposals in the Sicilian Regional Assembly to include Sicilian in the list of the Italian Law n. 482 of 1999.[3]

The autonomous regional parliament of Sicily has legislated Regional Law No. 9/2011 to encourage the teaching of Sicilian at all schools, but inroads into the education system have been slow. The CSFLS created a textbook "Dialektos" to comply with the law but does not provide an orthography to write the language. In Sicily, it is taught only as part of dialectology courses, but outside Italy, Sicilian has been taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Brooklyn College and Manouba University. Since 2009, it has been taught at the Italian Charities of America, in New York City (home to the largest Sicilian speaking community outside of Sicily and Italy) and it is also preserved and taught by family association, church organisations and societies, social and ethnic historical clubs and even Internet social groups, mainly in Gravesend and Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. On 15 May 2018, the Sicilian Region once again mandated the teaching of Sicilian in schools and referred to it as a language, not a dialect, in official communication.

Ethnologue report

Other names

Alternative names of Sicilian are Calabro-Sicilian, sicilianu, and sìculu. The first term refers to the fact that a form of Sicilian is spoken in southern Calabria, particularly in the province of Reggio Calabria. The other two are names for the language in Sicily itself: specifically, the term sìculu originally describes one of the larger prehistoric groups living in Sicily (the Italic Sicels or Siculi) before the arrival of Greeks in the 8th century BC (see below). It can also be used as a prefix to qualify or to elaborate further on the origins of a person, for example: Siculo-American (sìculu-miricanu) or Siculo-Australian.

Dialects

As a language, Sicilian has its own dialects in the following main groupings:

Western Sicilian (Palermitano in Palermo, Trapanese in Trapani, Central-Western Agrigentino in Agrigento)

Central metaphonetic (in the central part of Sicily that includes some areas of the provinces of Caltanissetta, Messina, Enna, Palermo and Agrigento)

Southeast metaphonetic (in the Province of Ragusa and the adjoining area within the Province of Syracuse)

Ennese (in the Province of Enna)

Eastern Non-metaphonetic (in the area including the Metropolitan City of Catania, the second largest city in Sicily, as Catanese, and the adjoining area within the Province of Syracuse)

Messinese (in the Metropolitan City of Messina, the third largest city in Sicily)

Eoliano (in the Aeolian Islands)

Pantesco (on the island of Pantelleria)

Reggino (in the Metropolitan City of Reggio Calabria, especially on the Scilla–Bova line, and excluding the areas of Locri and Rosarno, which represent the first isogloss that divide Sicilian from the continental varieties).

History

First let us turn our attention to the language of Sicily, since the Sicilian vernacular seems to hold itself in higher regard than any other, because all the poetry written by the Italians is called "Sicilian"...

Historical influences on Sicilian

Because Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea and many peoples have passed through it (Phoenicians, Ancient Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Jews, Byzantine Greeks, Arabs, Normans, Swabians, Catalans, Austrians, Italians), Sicilian displays a rich and varied influence from several languages in its lexical stock and grammar. These languages include Latin (as Sicilian is a Romance language itself), Ancient Greek, Byzantine Greek, Spanish, Norman, Lombard, Hebrew, Catalan, Occitan, Arabic and Germanic languages, and the languages of the island's aboriginal Indo-European and pre-Indo-European inhabitants, known as the Sicels, Sicanians and Elymians. The very earliest influences, visible in Sicilian to this day, exhibit both prehistoric Mediterranean elements and prehistoric Indo-European elements, and occasionally a blending of both.

Before the Roman conquest (3rd century BC), Sicily was occupied by various populations. The earliest of these populations were the Sicanians, considered to be autochthonous. The Sicels and the Elymians arrived between the second and first millennia BC. These aboriginal populations in turn were followed by the Phoenicians (between the 10th and 8th centuries BC) and the Greeks. The heavy Greek-language influence remains strongly visible, while the influences from the other groups are smaller and less obvious. What can be stated with certainty is that in Sicilian remain pre-Indo-European words of an ancient Mediterranean origin, but one cannot be more precise than that: of the three main prehistoric groups, only the Sicels were known to be Indo-European with a degree of certainty, and their speech is likely to have been closely related to that of the Romans.

The following table, listing words for "twins", illustrates the difficulty linguists face in tackling the various substrata of the Sicilian language.

A similar qualifier can be applied to many of the words that appear in this article. Sometimes it may be known that a particular word has a prehistoric derivation, but it is not known whether the Sicilians inherited it directly from the indigenous populations, or whether it came via another route. Similarly, it might be known that a particular word has a Greek origin but it is not known from which Greek period the Sicilians first used it (ancient Magna Grecia or the Byzantine period), or once again, whether the particular word may even have come to Sicily via another route. For instance, by the time the Romans had occupied Sicily, the Latin language had made its own borrowings from Greek.

Emergence as literary language

It was during the reign of Frederick II (or Frederick I of Sicily) between 1198 and 1250, with his patronage of the Sicilian School, that Sicilian became the first of the modern Italic languages to be used as a literary language. The influence of the school and the use of Sicilian itself as a poetic language was acknowledged by the two great Tuscan writers of the early Renaissance period, Dante and Petrarch. The influence of the Sicilian language should not be underestimated in the eventual formulation of a lingua franca that was to become modern Italian. The victory of the Angevin army over the Sicilians at Benevento in 1266 not only marked the end of the 136-year Norman-Swabian reign in Sicily but also effectively ensured that the centre of literary influence would eventually move from Sicily to Tuscany. While Sicilian, as both an official and a literary language, would continue to exist for another two centuries, the language would soon follow the fortunes of the kingdom itself in terms of prestige and influence.

Following the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, the kingdom came under the influence of the Crown of Aragon, and the Catalan language (and the closely related Aragonese) added a new layer of vocabulary in the succeeding century. For the following 250 years, Sicilian and Catalan were both official languages of the royal court in Palermo and Messina. Nevertheless, Catalans were eventually absorbed into the Sicilian way of life through intermarriage with local women, as the island's sheer size and larger population prevented any heavy cultural influence. Sicilian was also used to record the proceedings of the Sicilian Parliament (one of the oldest parliaments in Europe) and for other official purposes. While it is often difficult to determine whether a word came directly from Catalan (as opposed to Occitan), the following are likely to be such examples:

addunàrisi – "to notice, realise" (from adonar-se) (cognate of Maltese induna)

affruntàrisi – "to be embarrassed" (from afrontar-se)

arruciari – "to moisten, soak" (from arruixar) (cognate of Maltese raxx "to shower")

criscimonia – "growth, development" (from creiximoni)

Later history

As the Italian Renaissance reached its peak on the Italian Peninsula by the mid-16th century, the Italianization of written Sicilian in parliamentary and court records commenced. By 1543, this process was virtually complete; the Florentine dialect of Tuscan Italian became the lingua franca of the Italian peninsula and supplanted written Sicilian. Similar to their Aragonese predecessors, the Spanish authorities found that Italian remained more dominant in Sicily than Spanish, despite both languages being used for administrative and literary purposes, owing to the established prestige of Italian scholars and painters since the 14th century, despite the latter's prestige gained from the shift of focus to the Crown of Castile during the conquest of the Americas.

Spanish rule had hastened this process in two important ways:

Unlike the Aragonese, almost immediately the Spanish placed viceroys on the Sicilian throne. In a sense, the diminishing prestige of the Sicilian kingdom reflected the decline of Sicilian from an official, standarized written language to eventually non-standardized spoken dialects amongst a predominantly illiterate population.

The expulsion of all Jews from Spanish dominions that began in 1492 altered the population of Sicily. Not only did the population decline, many of whom were involved in important educated industries, but some of these Jewish families had been in Sicily for around 1,500 years, and Sicilian was their native language, which they used in their schools. Thus the seeds of a possible broad-based education system utilising books written in Sicilian were lost.

Spanish rule lasted over three centuries (not counting the Aragonese and Bourbon periods on either side) and had a significant influence on the Sicilian vocabulary. The following words are of Spanish derivation:

arricugghìrisi – "to return home" (from recogerse; but also Catalan recollir-se)

balanza/valanza – "scales" (from balanza)

fileccia – "arrow" (from flecha) (cognate of Maltese vleġġa)

Phonology

Consonants

Sicilian has a number of consonant sounds that set it apart from the other major Romance languages, notably its retroflex consonants.

ḌḌ/DD — The retroflex phoneme /ɖ/ (usually geminated or long [ɖː]) is normally the result of the evolution of Latin -ll-. This sound is rare but present among Romance languages, including Sardinian, Southern Corsican, and some dialects of Calabria. Similar but not identical sounds are also found in the rest of the Extreme Southern Italian dialect group. The older [lː] sequence is retained in some dialects, while the pronunciation of this phoneme as dental [dː] is increasingly common. Traditionally in Sicilian, the sound was written as -đđ-, and in more contemporary usage -dd- has been used. It is also often found written -ddh- or -ddr- (both of which are often considered confusing, as they may also represent [dː] and [ɖːɽ], respectively). In the Cademia Siciliana orthographical proposal as well as the Vocabolario siciliano descriptive orthography, the digraph -ḍḍ- is used. For example, the counterpart to Italian bello in Sicilian is beḍḍu.

DR and TR — The Sicilian pronunciation of the digraphs -dr- and -tr- is [ɖɽ] and [ʈɽ], or even [ɖʐ], [ʈʂ]. If they are preceded by a nasal consonant, n is then a retroflex nasal sound [ɳ].

GGHI and CCHI — The two digraphs -gh- and -ch-, when occurring before front vowel sounds i or e or a semivowel j, are pronounced as palatal stops [ɟ] and [c], though in central southern Sicily (Agrigento, Caltanissetta, Enna) -ggh- is pronounced as a voiced palatal fricative [ʝ]. From Italian, in place of -gl-, a geminated trigraph -ggh(i)- is used and is pronounced as [ɟː]. When -cch(j)- is geminated, -cch(j)- it can be pronounced as [cː].

RR — The digraph -rr-, depending on the variety of Sicilian, can be a long trill [rː] (hereafter transcribed without the length mark) or a voiced retroflex sibilant [ʐː]. This innovation is also found under slightly different circumstances in Polish, where it is spelled -rz-, and in some Northern Norwegian dialects, where speakers vary between [ʐ] and [ɹ̝]. At the beginning of a word, the single letter r is similarly always pronounced double, though this is not indicated orthographically. This phenomenon, however, does not include words that start with a single r resulting from rhotacism or apheresis (see below), which should not be indicated orthographically to avoid confusion with regular double r.

Vowels

Sicilian has five phonemic vowels: /i/, /ɛ/, /a/, /ɔ/, /u/. The mid-vowels /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ do not occur in unstressed position in native words but may do so in modern borrowings from Italian, English, or other languages. Historically, Sicilian /i/ and /u/ each represent the confluence of three Latin vowels (or four in unstressed position), hence their high frequency.

Unstressed /i/ and /u/ generally undergo reduction to [ɪ] and [ʊ] respectively, even though they may remain tense in word-/phrase-final position, as in [pʊsˈsibbɪli] 'possible' and [kʊˈniɟɟu] 'rabbit'.

As in Italian, vowels are allophonically lengthened in stressed open syllables.

In the vast majority of instances in which the originating word had an initial /i/, Sicilian has dropped it completely. That has also happened when there was once an initial /e/ and, to a lesser extent, /a/ and /o/: mpurtanti "important", gnuranti "ignorant", nimicu "enemy", ntirissanti "interesting", llustrari "to illustrate", mmàggini "image", cona "icon", miricanu "American".

Gemination and contractions

In Sicilian, gemination is distinctive for most consonant phonemes, but a few can be geminated only after a vowel: /b/, /dʒ/, /ɖ/, /ɲ/, /ʃ/ and /ts/. Rarely indicated in writing, spoken Sicilian also exhibits syntactic gemination (or dubbramentu), which means that the first consonant of a word is lengthened when it is preceded by words like è, ma, e, a, di, pi, chi – meaning ‘it is, but, and, to, of, for, what’. For instance in the phrase è bonu ‘it's good’, there is a doubled /bb/ in pronunciation.

The letter ⟨j⟩ at the start of a word can have two separate sounds depending on what precedes the word. For instance, in jornu ("day"), it is pronounced [j]. However, after a nasal consonant or if it is triggered by syntactic gemination, it is pronounced [ɟ] as in un jornu with [nɟ] or tri jorna ("three days") with [ɟɟ].

Another difference between the written and the spoken languages is the extent to which contractions occur in everyday speech. Thus a common expression such as avemu a accattari... ("we have to go and buy...") is generally reduced to âma 'ccattari in talking to family and friends.

The circumflex accent is commonly used in denoting a wide range of contractions in the written language, particularly the joining of simple prepositions and the definite article: di lu = dû ("of the"), a lu = ô ("to the"), pi lu = pû ("for the"), nta lu = ntô ("in the"), etc.

Grammar

Nouns and adjectives

Most feminine nouns and adjectives end in -a in the singular: casa ('house'), porta ('door'), carta ('paper'). Exceptions include soru ('sister') and ficu ('fig'). The usual masculine singular ending is -u: omu ('man'), libbru ('book'), nomu ('name'). The singular ending -i can be either masculine or feminine.

Unlike Standard Italian, Sicilian uses the same standard plural ending -i for both masculine and feminine nouns and adjectives: casi ('houses' or 'cases'), porti ('doors' or 'harbors'), tàuli ('tables'). Some masculine plural nouns end in -a instead, a feature that is derived from the Latin neuter endings -um, -a: libbra ('books'), jorna ('days'), vrazza ('arms', compare Italian braccio, braccia), jardina ('gardens'), scrittura ('writers'), signa ('signs'). Some nouns have irregular plurals: omu has òmini (compare Italian uomo, uomini), jocu ('game') jòcura (Italian gioco, giochi) and lettu ("bed") letta (Italian letto, letti). Three feminine nouns are invariable in the plural: manu ('hand[s]'), ficu ('fig[s]') and soru ('sister[s]').

Verbs

Sicilian has only one auxiliary verb, aviri, 'to have'. It is also used to denote obligation (e.g. avi a jiri, '[he/she] has to go'), and to form the future tense, as Sicilian for the most part no longer has a synthetic future tense: avi a cantari, '[he/she] will sing'.

As in English and like most other Romance languages, Sicilian may use the verb jiri, 'to go', to signify the act of being about to do something. Vaiu a cantari, 'I'm going to sing'. In this way, jiri + a + infinitive can also be a way to form the simple future construction.

The main conjugations in Sicilian are illustrated below with the verb èssiri, 'to be'.

The synthetic future is rarely used and, as Camilleri explains, continues its decline towards complete disuse. Instead, the following methods are used to express the future:

1) the use of the present indicative, which is usually preceded by an adverb of time:

Stasira vaju ô tiatru — 'This evening I go to the theatre'; or, using a similar English construction, 'This evening I am going to the theatre'

Dumani ti scrivu — 'Tomorrow I [will] write to you'

2) the use of a compound form consisting of the appropriate conjugation of aviri a ('have to') in combination with the infinitive form of the verb in question:

Stasira aju a ghiri ('j' becomes 'gh' after a vowel) ô tiatru — 'This evening I will [/must] go to the theatre'

Dumani t'aju a scrìviri — 'Tomorrow I will [/must] write to you'

In speech, the contracted forms of aviri often come into play:

Literature

Extracts from three of Sicily's more celebrated poets are offered below to illustrate the written form of Sicilian over the last few centuries: Antonio Veneziano, Giovanni Meli and Nino Martoglio.

A translation of the Lord's Prayer can also be found in J. K. Bonner. This is written with three variations: a standard literary form from the island of Sicily and a southern Apulian literary form.

Luigi Scalia translated the biblical books of Ruth, Song of Solomon and the Gospel of Matthew into Sicilian. These were published in 1860 by Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte.

Extract from Antonio Veneziano

(c. 1575–1580)

Extract from Giovanni Meli

(~1790)

Extract from Nino Martoglio

(~1900; trans: A game of Briscula amongst friends)

Influence on Italian

As one of the most spoken languages of Italy, Sicilian has notably influenced the Italian lexicon. In fact, there are several Sicilian words that are now part of the Italian language and usually refer to things closely associated to Sicilian culture, with some notable exceptions:

arancina (from arancia): a Sicilian cuisine specialty;

babbiare (from babbiari): to joke;

canestrato (from ncannistratu): a cheese typical of Sicily;

cannolo (from cannolu): a Sicilian pastry;

cannolicchio (from cannulicchiu): razor clam;

carnezzeria (from carnizzaria): butcher's shop;

caruso (from carusu): boy, especially a Sicilian one;

cassata: a Sicilian pastry;

cirneco (from cirnecu): a small breed of dogs common in Sicily;

cosca: a small group of criminals affiliated to the Sicilian mafia;

curatolo (from curàtulu): watchman in a farm, with a yearly contract;

dammuso (from dammusu): stony habitation typical of the island of Pantelleria;

intrallazzo (from ntrallazzu): illegal exchange of goods or favours, but in a wider sense also cheat, intrigue;

marranzano (from marranzanu): Jew's harp;

Use today

Sicily

Sicilian is estimated to have 5,000,000 speakers. However, it remains very much a home language that is spoken among peers and close associates. Regional Italian has encroached on Sicilian, most evidently in the speech of the younger generations.

In terms of the written language, it is mainly restricted to poetry and theatre in Sicily. The education system does not support the language, despite recent legislative changes, as mentioned previously. Local universities either carry courses in Sicilian or describe it as dialettologia, the study of dialects.

Calabria

The dialect of Reggio Calabria is spoken by some 260,000 speakers in the Reggio Calabria metropolitan area. It is recognised, along with the other Calabrian dialects, by the regional government of Calabria by a law promulgated in 2012 that protects Calabria's linguistic heritage.

Diaspora

Outside Sicily and Southern Calabria, there is an extensive Sicilian-speaking diaspora living in several major cities across South and North America and in other parts of Europe and Australia, where Sicilian has been preserved to varying degrees.

Media

The Sicilian-American organization Arba Sicula publishes stories, poems and essays, in Sicilian with English translations, in an effort to preserve the Sicilian language, in Arba Sicula, its bi-lingual annual journal (latest issue: 2017), and in a biennial newsletter entitled Sicilia Parra.

The 1948 film La Terra Trema is entirely in Sicilian and uses many local amateur actors.

The nonprofit organisation Cademia Siciliana publishes a Sicilian version of a quarterly magazine, "UNESCO Courier".