Introduction

to the study of the Sicilian language

Sicilianu

English

Welcome to Napizia. We hope you enjoy the Sicilian language resources presented here. We also hope you will help us improve the work presented here, because this is not the work of a linguist. This is the work of an economist.

It reflects the dataset assembly techniques used in empirical research. A lexicographer would write a dictionary one word at a time. What we're doing here is assembling a dataset. We hope it provides a nice learning resource for you.

A language is more than just vocabulary and grammar rules. It is the experience, wisdom and pride of the people who speak it. It's poetry, proverbs and prose. So we want to develop a dictionary of the language, not just a dictionary of the grammar. And that's why this project keeps growing.

It's growing from Marsala to Otranto because, like the kingdom of Roger II, the Sicilian language is found on the island and on the peninsula.

a grecophone definition of the Sicilian language

Italians often rush to tell you how different their hometown dialect is. In this section, we focus on the similarities between the dialects of the Sicilian language before we examine the differences.

The dialects spoken in Sicily, southern Calabria, Salento (southern Puglia) and Cilento share enough vocabulary and grammar that we should think of them as diatopic variations of a single language. Like other Romance languages, the Sicilian language evolved from Vulgar Latin after the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century.

What differentiates Sicilian from other Romance languages is geographic location. The Sicilian language emerged in the parts of southern Italy that the Byzantines controlled -- Sicily, southern Calabria and Salento. A Sicilian vocalism also emerged in southern Cilento (province of Salerno) where many Italo-Greeks migrated after the Lombard conquest.

Accordingly, the defining characteristic of the Sicilian language is the influence that Greek had on its lexicon and grammar. And the length of Greek influence accounts for the differences among dialects of Sicilian.

In support of this definition, we note that Rohlfs (1977) writes explicitly of "Latin Calabria" and "Greek Calabria." The former consists of today's province of Cosenza. The latter consists of today's provinces of Catanzaro, Crotone, Vibo Valentia and Reggio Calabria, where one finds a "continuity (without interruption) of the the Greek (or Greconic) language ... since ancient times." And at the conclusion of his notes on linguistic structure, Rohlfs describes the dialects spoken in southern Calabria as: "Romance material, Greek spirit."

Examining the dialects spoken in Salento, Rohlfs (1976) argues that the Salentino dialects display grammatical concordances with Ancient Greek that reflect: "a long and intense linguistic exchange between Greeks and Latins in a long bilingual environment" that dates back to ancient times, not the Byzantine period.

From Privitera (2004), we can also find quantitative support for our grecophone definition. After examining the etymologies of 5000 Sicilian words, he found that the contribution of Ancient Greek words to the Sicilian vocabulary is second only to Latin. Examples of Ancient Greek's lexical influences include "cirasa" (cherry) from the Greek "kerasi" and "grasta" (vase) from the Greek "gastra."

And in the dialects spoken in Salento, in southern Calabria and in the province of Messina, one can find the grammatical influence of Ancient Greek in the absence of infinitive after verbs that express desire or intention (Rohlfs 1977). Instead of the infinitive, these dialects use a conjunction followed by the conjugated form of the verb. The conjunction is "mi" in Messina, "mu" in southern Calabria and "mo" in Salento.

Cipolla (2021) provides this simple example. In western Sicily, one would say: "Dicci a Luigi di vèniri ccà!" (Tell Luigi to come here!), while in Messina, one would say: "Dicci a Luigi mi veni ccà!" (Tell Luigi so that he comes here!) Note however that all dialects of Sicilian use the infinitive to express possibility: "Luigi pò vèniri ccà." (Luigi can come here).

For a second example, we compare two versions of a proverb. In western Sicily, the proverb is: "La cuda è la chiù forti di scurciari" (The tail is the hardest to skin), while in southern Calabria the same proverb is: "La chiù brutta è la cuda mu si scorcia" (The hardest is the tail when somebody skins). The Greek influence causes the impersonal conjugated form "si scorcia" to follow the "mu" conjunction (instead of the infinitive following the preposition "di").

Another grammatical influence of Ancient Greek appears in the construction of conditional sentences. Presicce (web) provides a detailed description in his notes on the Salentino dialect of Scorrano. And conveniently, Rohlfs (1977) and Cipolla (2021) use the same example sentence: "If I knew, I would say."

In Salento and Reggio Calabria, both verbs in such a conditional sentence are in the imperfect indicative tense: "Si lu sapia, lu dicia." Rohlfs (1976, 1977) explains that this construction is an exact translation from Ancient Greek. Slightly differently, in Sicily, but not in Messina, both verbs are in the imperfect subjunctive tense: "Si lu sapissi, lu dicissi."

In Messina and southern Calabria, but not Reggio Calabria, one uses the conditional tense, which Rohlfs (1977) describes as a "neolatin creation" from Provenzal literary influences during the 11th and 12th centuries. In these areas, both verbs may be in the conditional tense: "Si lu sapiria, lu dirria." Or alternatively, the construction may feature one verb in the imperfect subjunctive and the other in the conditional: "Si lu sapissi, lu dirria," which exactly translates the Italian: "Se lo sapessi, lo direi."

According to Rohlfs (1976), another grammatical influence from Ancient Greek appears in the two different conjunctions that the Salentino dialects use to introduce a subordinate clause, "ca" and "cu". For illustration, he uses two simple examples: "pensu ca vene" (I think that he will come) and "ògghiu cu bbegna" (I want that he will come). The Calabrese and Sicilian dialects do not make such a distinction when introducing a subordinate clause.

Finally, to complete our grecophone definition of the Sicilian language, we show that differing lengths of Greek influence account for the differences among dialects of Sicilian. In particular, the dialects spoken in Salento had relatively more Greek influence and less Muslim Arab influence.

Over the course of the ninth century (827-902), Muslim Arabs took control of Sicily from the Byzantines and remained in control of the island until the eleventh-century Norman conquest (1061-1091). However, Muslim Arab control on the peninsula was much shorter. The Emirate of Bari, for example, only lasted 24 years (847-871). And by the end of the ninth century, the Byzantines had entirely pushed Muslim forces out of Calabria.

But as Rohlfs (1977) notes, the linguistic influence of Arabic came from the economic power of Arab merchants, who traded across geopolitical boundaries and introduced many new ideas and technologies to the region (esp. irrigation). Accordingly, trade patterns may explain why one can find many traces of Arabic both in Sicily (which Arabs controlled) and in southern Calabria (which Arabs only fleetingly controlled).

For example, the words "mischinu" (unfortunate one) and "sceccu" (donkey), which come from the Arabic words "miskin" and "sheik" respectively, appear in vocabularies from Sicily and southern Calabria, but not in the ones from Salento, where Greek retained a longer influence.

Accordingly, the defining characteristic of Sicilian is the influence that Greek had on its lexicon and grammar. And the length of Greek influence accounts for the differences among dialects of Sicilian.

Using maps and research from the CSFLS at the University of Palermo, Cipolla (2021) describes the diatopic variation across all of the dialects spoken on the island of Sicily. I hope that one day a linguist (someone with higher qualification than me!) will write a supplement that extends his comparisons and descriptions to southern Calabria and Salento.

towards a modern literary standard

Having defined the language and differentiated the diatopic variations, we need a common way to represent the language in writing, not to replace the local dialects, but rather to gather them all together and create a whole that's worth more than the sum of its parts.

For example, Nino De Vita writes narrative poetry that depicts the lives of people in his Marsala neighborhood of Cutusio, while Orlando Accetta writes poetry about life in Calabria and Nicola Giuseppe De Donno writes poetry about life in Salento. What these three poets have in common is their use of local dialect to discuss local issues. Their dialects differ, but they're writing the same language in the same literary tradition.

So when we record examples of their poetry on the pages of Chiù dâ Palora, we record examples of the different ways that people speak from Marsala to Otranto. And organizing these examples, we develop a common representation of the written language – a modern literary standard suitable for poetry and prose. To that end, this section describes efforts to create a modern literary standard.

Rohlfs (1976) cites two dictionaries published in Sicily in the 18th century – Del Bono (1751) and Pasqualino (1785) – and explains that they were among the first regional language dictionaries published in Italy. Dictionaries of the dialects spoken in southern Calabria and Salento first appeared in the late 19th century.

In the introduction to his Calabrese vocabulary, Accattatis (1895) explains that Calabria has never had a literary standard, and then argues that the Casalino-Apriglianese dialect would be well-suited for the purpose. In support of his proposal, his dictionary contains a grammar and a list several poets who wrote in Casalino-Apriglianese. And you don't even have to conduct a new search for these poets! Appendix II of his dictionary has a list of Calabrese writers, short biographies of them and samples of their texts.

One can find 20th-century Calabrese poetry in the volume of southern Italian dialect poetry collected and translated by Bonaffini (1997). Most of the Calabrese poets in that collection wrote in their local dialect. Only one of them, Achille Curcio, makes an "obvious effort to develop a broader koinè." Nevertheless, despite the limited use, with regard to a standardized Calabrese language, Accattatis (1895) presents a well-developed proposal. And, importantly for Calabria, he selected a dialect from the center of the region.

In Salento, Bonaffini observes that Salentino has always been the language of the cultured class, a condition favorable to the development of a koinè. Nonetheless, given the linguistic diversity of Puglia, the region similarly lacks a literary standard. What we record on the pages of Chiù dâ Palora are the dialects of the south of the region.

For broad adoption, a literary standard must represent a broad range of dialects, not the dialect of one particular town.

That condition was met in the 13th century. Because the Sicilian School of Poets at the court of Emperor Frederick II was always travelling across southern Italy, they wrote poetry that combined the different dialects, thus creating a language that served as a means of communication across regions.

It was the first literature written in an Italic language other than Latin. While translating Provencal poetry into the language of the imperial court, they enriched the existing Sicilian vocabulary with new words from Latin and Provencal. The Sicilian School inspired Dante to write poetry in his native Florentine. And Shakespeare wrote his sonnets in accordance with the 14-line structure that the poets of the School developed.

And if the original copies of their poems had survived, those poems would certainly have formed the basis of today's literary Sicilian language. But as Cipolla (2026) explains, the original copies disappeared after the death of Frederick II in 1250 and the defeat of the Ghibelline forces in 1266. What survives are 14th-century translations into Tuscan, which he retranslated into Sicilian by making educated guesses about the text of the originals.

Nonetheless, we can take inspiration from 16th-century poets like Antonio Veneziano and 18th-century poets like Giovanni Meli and Domenico Tempio, who used the common literary standard recorded in the dictionaries compiled by Mortillaro (1876), Nicotra (1883) and Traina (1868), explained in the textbook by Bonner (2001), and explained in Prof. Cipolla's two textbooks, Learn Sicilian (2013) and Learn Sicilian II (2021). Building on their work, we can create a modern literary standard.

three options for the language

The previous section implies that there are two possible ways to develop a modern literary standard. The first way (and the easier way) is to adopt the Sicilian koinè. The second way is to develop standards for each of the principle dialects.

Accordingly, if the people of Calabria and Salento prefer separate standards, then there are three options for the language – the Sicilian koinè, Accattatis' proposal for Calabrese and an eventual proposal for Salentino.

But setting preferences aside and focusing solely on linguistics, we have already observed that these dialects share enough vocabulary and grammar that we should think of them as diatopic variations of a single language.

Using the Trova na Palora tool to compare dialect poetry, one will notice that Calabrese poets like Orlando Accetta, Achille Curcio and Nicola Giunta use a vocabulary and grammar that's very similar to the vocabulary and grammar that Sicilian poets like Ignazio Buttitta and Nino Martoglio use. They pronounce words differently, but they use a very similar vocabulary and grammar.

As explained above, the dialects spoken in Salento have less Arabic influence and a longer Greek influence than the dialects spoken in Sicily and southern Calabria. Accordingly, Salento has a slightly different vocabulary, but its grammar is similar to that of Messinese and southern Calabrese. That's why someone who reads the Salentino verses of Nicola Giuseppe De Donno will recognize them as a dialect of the broader Sicilian language.

The Salentino dialects also display a few grammatical differences not listed above. In particular, the dialects spoken in Sicily and Calabria use the remote past, while the Salentino dialects have a tendency to use the past perfect (like Italian). And the Salentino dialects do not use the French "ci" as an adverb of place (unlike Italian, Sicilian and Calabrese). Nonetheless, they are dialects of the broader Sicilian language, so the Sicilian koinè could serve the dialects spoken in Salento too.

But a better option for Salentino is to develop a separate standard. The work of Presicce (web) provides a draft of a proposal. And if that work is to be done for the Salentino dialects, then it would also make sense to develop a separate standard for Calabrese too. Accattatis (1895) presents a well-developed proposal.

project napizia

Project Napizia will always be a work in progress. It started as a simple effort to conjugate Sicilian verbs and quickly grew into something much larger. In addition to the dictionary, we're also developing a machine translator.

To provide examples of language, Chiù dâ Palora presents a selection of poetry and a selection of proverbs from Nicotra (1883) and Mortillaro's (1876) dictionaries. You can search the poetry and proverbs with the Trova na Palora tool.

If you enjoy their proverbs or if they help you learn the Sicilian language, you should acquire a copy of Arthur Dieli's Proverbi Siciliani. Dr. Dieli collected his proverbs from a different set of sources, so you will find a different set of proverbs in his book. He also translated them into English and (where appropriate) provides explanatory notes and information.

Dr. Dieli's vocabulary lists forms the basis of the dictionary presented here. He gave me a lot of support and encouragement. And so I hope to keep his work moving forward.

You should also subscribe to Arba Sicula. Every issue is contains poetry, essays, narratives, artwork, recipes and more with Sicilian on the left page and English on the right page. It's a joy to read and its editor, Gaetano Cipolla, has also provided a lot of support for this project. So if this work has been helpful to you, please support their work too.

acknowledgments

Thank you to Arba Sicula, Gaetano Cipolla and Arthur Dieli for developing the resources that made this project possible. They and the Dieli family also provided a lot of intellectual support, resources and encouragement. Their help and assistance built this dictionary.

Thank you to the New York Public Library for collecting research materials on the Sicilian language and for making the books available to me. Thank you to Google Books for putting a large collection of dictionaries at our fingertips. And thank you to Gyan Books for beautifully reproducing them for me.

Thank you to the Bardari and Sciarrone families of Pizzo Calabro for their hospitality, for helping me learn the language and for encouraging me to study the language, the culture and its people.

Finally, thank you to Peter Zacharias of the Pennsylvania Dutch Dictionary for his encouragement and suggestions. A kindred spirit is a big help on a project like this. He has given me several ideas that I hope to implement in the near future.

contact

If you would like to get in touch with me, you may write to me at: eryk@napizia.com. I would be happy to hear from you.