Napizia

Dictionary of the Sicilian Language

Sicilian

English

Welcome to Napizia, where we're developing a dictionary and translator for the language of poetry, the language spoken by the people of Sicily, Calabria and Puglia.

The townspeople here speak Napitinu, a Calabrese dialect of the Sicilian language, which we are annotating with grammar, proverbs, poetry, prose and examples.

The dialects spoken in Sicily, Calabria and Puglia have very different sounds, but the language is one. On these pages, we present the language and the dialects.

You can search our collection with the Trova na Palora tool. Each poem is recorded exactly as it was written in the original source, so that each dialect of the language is recorded on these pages.

All poetry is attributed to its author. Unless otherwise noted, the proverbs come from Nicotra's (1883) dictionary. And our dictionary is based on Arthur Dieli's vocabulary lists.

Our Tradutturi Sicilianu translates simple sentences fairly well, but it's still in a developmental stage. Quality will improve over time as we collect more examples for the machine to learn from.

The training data was kindly supplied by Arba Sicula and Arthur Dieli along with their warm support and assistance. We invite you to help us too. Most of our language resources come from Sicily, so we would especially appreciate samples of the dialects spoken in Calabria and Puglia.

We invite everyone to come to Napizia and join us in our study of the language.