It is not a dialect of Italian: it is a Romance language with a code of its own (ISO 639-3: scn), over four million speakers, a literature older than Dante’s Florentine, and a regional law prescribing its teaching in schools. It is made of Latin, Greek, Arabic, French, Catalan and Spanish: every people that ruled the island left its words, and the words stayed even after the kings had gone.
This page is written in Italian and English; other languages read the English text.
A dialect is a variety of a language: Romanesco is Italian spoken in Rome. Sicilian is not Italian spoken in Sicily. It comes from Latin by a road of its own, parallel to that of Tuscan, and already had a grammar, a phonology and a written poetry when Florentine was not yet anyone’s language outside Florence. That Italian later became the language of the State and Sicilian did not is a political story, not a linguistic one: linguistics classifies it as a language of its own within the extreme southern Italo-Romance group, together with southern Calabrian and Salentino.
Each ruling power left words in a specific field: where it ruled, it gave the names. To read the lexicon is to read the history.
Before the Greeks the island spoke the languages of the three peoples living there: the Elymians in the west (Segesta, Erice), the Sicani in the centre, the Sicels in the east. Of those languages a few inscriptions survive and, above all, place names; the name of the island itself comes from the Sicels. It is the oldest layer: almost invisible in the lexicon, yet it is the ground on which everything else settled.
With Naxos (734 BC) and Syracuse (733 BC) eastern Sicily becomes Magna Graecia. Greek remains the language of most of the island for over a thousand years, even under Rome, and returns in force with Byzantium. It left Sicilian words of the house, the countryside and animals, that is of everyday life: a sign that Greek here was not the language of scholars but of the people.
After the First Punic War Sicily is Rome’s first province. The Latin of soldiers, settlers and merchants settles over Greek and becomes, centuries later, the backbone of Sicilian: grammar, verbs, numbers, the names of things. Sicilian does not descend from Italian: it descends from Latin, as Italian, Spanish and French do. They are sister languages, not mother and daughter. Some Latin words survived in Sicilian and vanished elsewhere.
With Justinian the island returns to the Eastern Empire and Greek returns as the language of government and church. For three centuries eastern Sicily and the Val Demone remain largely Greek-speaking: this is why many Greek words in Sicilian are not two thousand but one thousand years old, having entered in the Byzantine age, and why the Normans would still find monasteries and villages speaking Greek.
Landing at Mazara in 827, the Aghlabids take Palermo in 831 and make it one of the great cities of the Mediterranean. With them come citrus fruit, sugar cane, mulberry, cotton, rice, irrigation systems. The Arabic words of Sicilian are exactly these: water, fields, measures, food, house. And the map of the island is full of Arabic names: Marsala (marsā ʿAlī, “Ali’s harbour”), Caltanissetta, Calatafimi and Caltagirone (qalʿa, “castle”), Misilmeri (manzil al-amīr, “the emir’s halt”), Racalmuto and Regalbuto (raḥl, “hamlet”), Gibellina and Mongibello (jabal, “mountain”), Alcantara (al-qanṭara, “the bridge”), Favara (fawwāra, “spring”).
Roger of Hauteville enters Messina in 1061 and Palermo in 1072; in 1130 Roger II is king of Sicily. The court speaks Old French and Norman, the chanceries Latin, Greek and Arabic together. This is when Sicily becomes Latin again: the Normans bring settlers from northern Italy, and their towns still speak Gallo-Italic dialects today (Piazza Armerina, Nicosia, Sperlinga, San Fratello, Aidone, Novara di Sicilia). French leaves Sicilian the verbs of work and trade and the names of crafts; in Palermo the Vucciria is the boucherie, the meat market.
At the court of Frederick II, between 1230 and 1266, a group of notaries and officials writes love poetry in Sicilian: this is the Sicilian School, the first lyric poetry in a language of Italy. Giacomo da Lentini invents the sonnet; Cielo d’Alcamo writes “Rosa fresca aulentissima”. A century later Dante, in De vulgari eloquentia, notes that everything Italians wrote in verse was called “Sicilian”. The Tuscans copied those texts and adapted them to their own tongue. Sicilian had a written literature before Dante’s Florentine.
With the Vespers of 1282 Sicily drives out the Angevins and calls Peter of Aragon. For more than two centuries the crown is Aragonese and the language of business and administration is Catalan: hence the verbs of feelings and everyday gestures that Sicilian shares with Barcelona and Valencia and that Italian lacks.
With Charles V Sicily is a Spanish viceroyalty for two centuries. Castilian is the language of power and aristocracy, and leaves Sicilian words of the house, of emotions and of daily talk, together with a taste for ceremony still audible in greetings.
After Savoy and Austria, from 1734 the Bourbons and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; in 1860 Garibaldi, in 1861 Italy. Since then school, army, radio and television bring Italian into every home, and Sicilian goes from everyone’s language to the language of family and village. Today over four million people speak it, almost all bilingual; UNESCO lists it among “vulnerable” languages, that is alive but in need of protection.
Giacomo da Lentini, Pier della Vigna, Guido delle Colonne, Cielo d’Alcamo: at Frederick II’s court the sonnet is born, and the first lyric poetry in a language of Italy.
The poet from Monreale, friend of Cervantes (they were prisoners together in Algiers): his “Celia” is the Sicilian songbook of the sixteenth century.
Abbot, physician and poet from Palermo: the “Buccolica” and the moral fables are the classic of the language, read and sung for two centuries.
The Catanian who wrote in Sicilian the freest and most outspoken satire of the eighteenth century.
Theatre in Sicilian: his comedies and the newspaper “D’Artagnan” made Sicilian a stage language, with Angelo Musco and later Pirandello.
The poet from Bagheria: “Put a people in chains, strip it, gag it, it is still free… a people becomes poor and enslaved when its language is stolen”.
The “Vigatese” of Inspector Montalbano brought Sicilian, blended with Italian, into millions of homes and thirty languages.
With these, whoever you talk to will see that you made the effort to learn. Pronounce every vowel and take your time.
Trinaka speaks Sicilian too: pick “Sicilianu” in the language switcher.
Sources: Vocabolario Siciliano (CSFLS, Piccitto–Tropea–Trovato); G. Ruffino, Sicilia (Laterza); A. Varvaro, Lingua e storia in Sicilia; Dante, De vulgari eloquentia I, xii; UNESCO Atlas; Ethnologue; regional law 9/2011. Etymologies marked “forse” (perhaps) are debated among scholars.