Sicilian language

Sicilian is a Romance language that is spoken on the island of Sicily and its satellite islands.
It belongs to the broader Extreme Southern Italian language group.
Ethnologue describes Sicilian as being "distinct enough from Standard Italian to be considered a separate language", and it is recognized as a minority language by UNESCO. It has been referred to as a language by the Sicilian Region. It has the oldest literary tradition of the Italo-Romance languages. A version of the UNESCO Courier is also available in 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, Canada, 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, 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. 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. There are currently proposals in the Sicilian Regional Assembly to include Sicilian in the list of the Italian Law n. 482 of 1999.
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 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.
The language is officially recognized in the municipal statutes of some Sicilian towns, such as Caltagirone and Grammichele, in which the "inalienable historical and cultural value of the Sicilian language" is proclaimed. Furthermore, the Sicilian language would be protected and promoted under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Although Italy has signed the treaty, the Italian Parliament has not ratified it. It is not included in Italian Law No. 482/1999 although some other minority languages of Sicily are.

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 before the arrival of Greeks in the 8th century BC. It can also be used as a prefix to qualify or to elaborate further on the origins of a person, for example: Siculo-American or Siculo-Australian.

Dialects

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

Western Sicilian
Central Metafonetic
Southeast Metafonetic
Ennese
Eastern Non-Metafonetic
Messinese
Eoliano
Pantesco
Reggino.
History

Early influences

Because Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea and many peoples have passed through it, Sicilian displays a rich and varied influence from several languages in its lexical stock and grammar. These languages include Latin, 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, 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 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.

Stratification

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

Stratum	Word	Source
Modern	giameddi	Italian gemelli
Medieval	bizzuni, vuzzuni	Old French or Catalan bessons
Medieval	binelli	Ligurian beneli
Ancient	èmmuli	Latin gemelli
Ancient	cucchi	Latin copula
Ancient	minzuddi	Latin medii
Ancient	ièmiddi, ièddimi	Ancient Greek δίδυμοι

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, 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.

Pre-classical period

The words with a prehistoric Mediterranean derivation often refer to plants native to the Mediterranean region or to other natural features. Bearing in mind the qualifiers mentioned above, examples of such words include:

alastra – "spiny broom"
ammarrari – "to dam or block a canal or running water"
calancuni – "ripples caused by a fast running river"
calanna – "landslide of rocks"
racioppu – "stalk or stem of a fruit etc."
timpa – "crag, cliff".

There are also Sicilian words with an ancient Indo-European origin that do not appear to have come to the language via any of the major language groups normally associated with Sicilian, i.e. they have been independently derived from a very early Indo-European source. The Sicels are a possible source of such words, but there is also the possibility of a cross-over between ancient Mediterranean words and introduced Indo-European forms. Some examples of Sicilian words with an ancient Indo-European origin:

dudda – "mulberry"
scrozzu – "not well developed"
sfunnacata – "multitude, vast number".
Greek influences

In 535, Justinian I made Sicily a Byzantine province, which returned the Greek language to a position of prestige, at least on an official level. At this time the island could be considered a border zone with moderate levels of bilingualism: Latinisation was mostly concentrated in western Sicily, largely among the upper class, whereas Eastern Sicily remained predominantly Greek.
The following Sicilian words are of a Greek origin :

babbiari – "to fool around"
bucali – "pitcher"
bùmmulu – "water receptacle"
cartedda – "basket"
carusu – "boy"
casèntaru – "earthworm"
cirasa – "cherry"
cona – "icon, image, metaphor"
cuddura – type of bread
grasta – "flower pot"
naca – "cradle"
ntamari – "to stun, amaze"
pistiari – "to eat"
tuppiàri – "to knock"
nìcaru – "small, young"
Germanic influences

From 476 to 535, the Ostrogoths ruled Sicily, although their presence apparently did not affect the Sicilian language. The few Germanic influences to be found in Sicilian do not appear to originate from this period. One exception might be abbanniari or vanniari "to hawk goods, proclaim publicly", from Gothic "to give a signal". Also possible is schimmenti "diagonal" from Gothic "slanting". Other sources of Germanic influences include the Hohenstaufen rule of the 13th century, words of Germanic origin contained within the speech of 11th-century Normans and Lombard settlers, and the short period of Austrian rule in the 18th century.
Many Germanic influences date back to the time of the Swabian kings. Some of the words [|below] are "reintroductions" of Latin words that had been Germanicized at some point. Words that probably originate from this era include:

arbitriari – "to work in the fields"
vardari – "to watch over"
guddefi – "forest, woods"
guzzuniari – "to wag, as in a tail"
lancedda
sparagnari – "to save money"