Students studying Italian are often told that “the Italian language lives together with regional languages.” There are many of these languages spoken locally with a limited number of speakers throughout the peninsula, of which Sicilian is perhaps the most well-known.
When talking about Sicilian, it is usually defined as a dialect of Italian, although actually, it's not. It's a real language. Did you know that Sicilian can be considered the first romance language? It derives directly from Latin, as does Italian. To be more specific, Italian derives from the Tuscan dialect which acquired, over the years, great importance and began to pave the way for what we would now consider “Italian”. This was mainly because of the influence of literature, and a poet whom we all know: the famous and much-feared Dante Alighieri! Dante wrote in Tuscan – which was a dialect – and at times used words deriving from the Sicilian, potentially because of the effect of the Sicilian school, founded by Frederick II. This school produced a vast body of poems and sonnets written in the local language (Sicilian) and strongly influenced the literature born afterwards in Tuscany, which can be
considered the birthplace of Italian literature.
What do we really know about Sicilian?
By Giovanna Mela
Photography: Tommie Hansen -Flickr.com
I am
Io sono
Sugnu
a while ago
poco fa
antura