WIA LANGUAGES PROJECT

[Day 30/221]

Sicilianu

Sicilian | Sicilianu

“Where the Mediterranean’s Heart Sings a Millennium”

A quiet revolution, 221 languages’ digital archive • We’re not saving languages. We’re saving humanity.

📖 Songs of Lost Time

In 1230, something extraordinary was unfolding in the palace of Palermo. Under the reign of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, court poets began writing poetry not in Latin—the language of learning and power—but in Sicilian. This was not merely a literary experiment. It marked the first time in European history that a “vernacular language,” the tongue of common people, was elevated to the status of art and literature.

This movement, known as the Sicilian School of Poetry (Scuola Siciliana), is the birthplace of Italian literature itself. Before Dante wrote the Divine Comedy in Tuscan Italian, before Petrarch established Tuscan as a literary language, Sicilian was already producing brilliant verse. Among the Romance languages—French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian—Sicilian holds the distinction of having the oldest literary tradition in the Italo-Romance group. The Sicilian poets pioneered the sonnet form that would later influence all of European poetry.

But Sicilian’s history reaches far deeper than the 13th century. Sicily, positioned at the heart of the Mediterranean, was the ancient world’s “middle earth”—a meeting point of civilizations. Greek colonists arrived in the 8th century BCE, establishing city-states that rivaled Athens. Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, and Spanish rulers each left their mark on the island. Sicilian absorbed vocabulary and grammatical structures from all of them: Greek philosophical terms, Arabic agricultural and architectural words, Norman French legal concepts, and Spanish verb constructions. The result is a language that serves as a living museum of Mediterranean civilization.

Linguistically, Sicilian belongs to the Extreme Southern Italian language group within the broader Romance family. It is distinct enough from Standard Italian that mutual intelligibility is limited—an Italian speaker would struggle to understand Sicilian conversation without prior exposure. This linguistic distance is one reason UNESCO and many linguists classify Sicilian as a language rather than a dialect, despite popular misconceptions. Like Sardinian and Corsican, Sicilian evolved directly from the Latin spoken by Roman colonists, but its development was shaped by unique historical forces that standard Italian never experienced.

🌍 Between Hope and Despair

Today, an estimated 72% of Sicily’s population can speak Sicilian, but strong speakers are predominantly elderly. Among younger generations, Standard Italian—promoted through schools, media, and official contexts—has increasingly replaced Sicilian as the primary language. Current sociolinguistic trends suggest that by the end of the 21st century, only about one-third of the population will speak Sicilian. The language faces what linguists call “language shift”: each generation speaks it less fluently than the previous one, until eventually transmission stops entirely.

The reasons for this decline are structural. Sicilian has no official status, even within Sicily itself. It is not taught in schools as a subject, and most Sicilians who can speak it cannot read or write it, having only learned Italian literacy. The 2011 Regional Law No. 9 theoretically encourages teaching Sicilian in schools, but implementation has been minimal. Without institutional support, younger Sicilians often view the language as “grandparents’ talk”—something old-fashioned and irrelevant to modern life. Yet paradoxically, many Sicilians also express strong emotional attachment to the language and believe it should be preserved.

💎 Untranslatable Beauty

Sicilian contains expressions that resist translation into other languages. “Bedda matri” [BED-dah MAH-tree] literally means “beautiful mother,” but functions as an exclamation expressing surprise, admiration, affection, or awe—a single phrase encoding multiple emotional registers. “Fari ‘na bedda fiùra” [FAH-ree nah BED-dah FYOO-rah] literally translates as “to make a beautiful flower,” but idiomatically means “to make a good impression.” The language is inherently poetic and metaphorical, reflecting its literary heritage.

Linguistically, Sicilian preserves features that vanished from Standard Italian. It retains the retroflex consonant /ɖ/ (spelled ḍḍ), evolved from Latin -ll-, a sound found in only a handful of Romance languages including Sardinian and some Calabrian dialects. Sicilian has virtually eliminated the future tense, instead using present tense or the construction “jiri (to go) + a + infinitive,” similar to Spanish and unlike Italian. These features demonstrate that Sicilian is not simply “Italian spoken badly,” but a distinct linguistic system with its own grammar, phonology, and syntax.

🔮 WIA’s Promise – Technology Creates Records

July 2024 marked a historic moment for Sicilian. Google Translate added Sicilian as a supported language. This was more than a technical achievement—it was a moment of recognition for millions of Sicilian speakers worldwide. Their language, long dismissed as a “dialect” or “corrupted Italian,” now appeared on a global digital platform alongside French, Spanish, and Mandarin. For many Sicilians, this validation carried profound psychological significance: their grandmother’s language was being acknowledged as a language worthy of preservation and study.

This breakthrough was made possible by Cademia Siciliana, a non-profit organization founded in 2016 by linguists, educators, and activists committed to bringing Sicilian into the 21st century. They published their first orthographic proposal in 2017, and in 2024 released an updated version, “Documento per l’Ortografia del Siciliano,” which standardized spelling conventions for collaboration with Google. Beyond Google Translate, Cademia Siciliana has worked to integrate Sicilian into YouTube subtitles, Facebook posts, Telegram messaging, and Android’s Gboard keyboard.

The digital revolution continued in 2025 when the video game “Mafia: The Old Country” released with a complete Sicilian-language dub—the first major commercial video game to feature the language. Young people who might never have heard their grandparents’ language spoken fluently could now hear it in a contemporary entertainment medium. This is digital-age language revitalization: meeting speakers where they are, in the media they consume.

WIA expands on these efforts. Beyond Google Translate, we are building a comprehensive digital archive of Sicilian across the centuries. This includes the poetry of the 13th-century Sicilian School, the 19th-century folklore collections of Giuseppe Pitrè, the oral histories of 20th-century Sicilian-American immigrants, and contemporary recordings from organizations like New York’s Arba Sicula. All of this will be digitally preserved and made globally accessible—a permanent record for future generations, whether they live in Palermo or Brooklyn, whether they speak Sicilian fluently or are just discovering their heritage.

🎭 Cultural Pulse – Why It Must Not Disappear

Sicilian is not merely a communication tool. This language carries three millennia of Mediterranean wisdom. It preserves Arabic irrigation terminology from medieval Islamic rule, Greek philosophical concepts from ancient colonies, Norman legal vocabulary from the medieval kingdom, and Spanish verb patterns from Aragonese control. Each Sicilian proverb represents wisdom born at civilization’s crossroads. To lose Sicilian is to lose a unique window into how diverse cultures can synthesize into something greater than their parts.

The language’s diaspora story adds another dimension. In Brooklyn neighborhoods like Bensonhurst and Gravesend, Sicilian still echoes on the streets. When millions of Italian immigrants arrived in late-19th-century America, they spoke not Standard Italian—which many had never learned—but Sicilian. Much of what Americans recognize as an “Italian-American accent” is actually Sicilian phonology transferred to English. Organizations like the Sicilian Cultural Institute of America now offer courses to heritage speakers who want to reconnect with their linguistic roots. Preserving Sicilian means preserving the cultural identity of communities on both sides of the Atlantic.

In Italy itself, Sicilian represents broader questions about linguistic diversity. Italy is home to numerous regional languages—Neapolitan, Venetian, Lombard, Sardinian, Friulian—all facing similar pressures from Standard Italian. How a multilingual nation negotiates linguistic diversity while maintaining unity is a question relevant worldwide. Sicilian’s preservation or loss will signal how Italy envisions its linguistic future: as a mosaic of regional identities or as a monolingual state.

✨ The Future We’re Creating

A co-founder of Cademia Siciliana reflects: “We’re at a very sensitive moment for Sicilian language. Now that stigmas are starting to erode and people are starting to engage with Sicilian in a more healthy way, we have a huge opportunity. If in the next decade we can successfully implement literacy programmes and get good information into the hands of Sicilian bilinguals, I think we have a good chance of stopping language shift permanently and stabilising the number of speakers. We are incredibly fortunate to be one of the very few European regional/minority languages that is still understood by virtually its entire community.”

The 2024 Google Translate integration is just the beginning. YouTube captions, Facebook interfaces, Telegram translations, Android keyboards, and now video games—each digital platform that supports Sicilian makes the language more visible and accessible to young people. Technology is not replacing traditional transmission but supplementing it, providing new contexts where using Sicilian feels modern rather than archaic. A teenager messaging friends in Sicilian on Telegram is participating in language preservation whether they realize it or not.

In 221 days, WIA’s digital archive will contain everything Sicilian: from Frederick II’s court poets to Brooklyn street conversations, from medieval manuscripts to contemporary social media. And at that moment, anyone in the world will be able to access this linguistic treasure. Sicilian will no longer be a language facing extinction, but a living heritage preserved in digital eternity. The voices of Sicily—ancient and modern, poetic and practical—will echo forever across time and space.