Sicilian use in Sicily

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Sicilian use in Sicily

Postby David27 » Fri Nov 26, 2021 9:42 pm

I met an older gentleman today who was Sicilian who moved to New York when he was 15. He spoke only Sicilian growing up and never learned Italian formally so he doesn’t really know it. In the last 5 years, he went back to Sicily for the first time, and he could speak with his cousins in Sicilian, but anywhere else in town, and particularly with younger people, they switched to English because he had trouble communicating since they spoke standard Italian. Does anyone know what the linguistic situation is like there broadly speaking?
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Re: Sicilian use in Sicily

Postby rdearman » Tue Nov 30, 2021 6:02 pm

So I had a language exchange with a Sicilian fellow the other day, and this question was on my mind, so I asked him. I'll try to paraphrase the conversation here, so if I've made mistakes in his meaning, then it is all my fault. (I invited him to the forum, so he might want to correct me directly!)

He believes that your older gentleman would also be switched on by the youth of Sicily, simply because the dialect has moved on was well. The dialect that the American learned in his youth is different from the dialect they speak now. This LE partner was 21 years old, so probably knows what he speaks of. He said he often switched to standard Italian with older folks because the dialect could be awkward and standard Italian could be easier depending on the age of the two people. So if he couldn't switch to standard Italian from the "youth dialect" then they probably would have switched to English as the lowest common denominator.

It was interesting to me that there is a lot of divergence in the dialect from 15-20 years ago.
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Re: Sicilian use in Sicily

Postby David27 » Tue Nov 30, 2021 6:14 pm

Very interesting! Thank you for inquiring. I’m surprised too by such a shift that English was easier to use for them. As an aside though he’s in his 60’s and left when he was 15 years old, hence a 45-50 year gap since he’s been there, so without a commonly practiced written standard or television or radio, maybe the change can be quite significant.
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Re: Sicilian use in Sicily

Postby Saim » Wed Dec 01, 2021 3:01 am

rdearman wrote:
It was interesting to me that there is a lot of divergence in the dialect from 15-20 years ago.


As far as I understand, even in parts of Italy where the traditional local languages are relatively vital, they are rapidly undergoing quite substantial influence from Italian and losing lots of their distinctive features and vocabulary. That process could explain the rate of change.

It could even be possible that the Siclian-speaking New Yorker mentioned by the OP can't reliably tell the difference between very Italianised Sicilian and Sicilian-accented Italian, and so perhaps is exaggerating the proportion of young people that can "only" speak Italian.
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Re: Sicilian use in Sicily

Postby Cainntear » Wed Dec 01, 2021 2:55 pm

When I was living in Palermo, I heard very little Sicilian. It seemed to be considered very much a "peasant" language -- city folks and rich folks weren't interested.

I was teaching some lessons as an outside English-language expert in a joint campus primary/secondary school in a very poor area of town, and I heard kids grassing each other up with "parla dialetto!" a couple of times. When one grassed someone up to me, I responded with a very stern look and "and you are speaking Italian in English class", because it was the nearest to defending the language I felt I could get away with.

Another week, one of the kids asked me what "more" meant, and rather than do the nonsense thing of trying to explain and demonstrate, I just responded with "cchiù", cos I'd decided I didn't want to say "più". The kid and the guy next to him were staring at me, expressionlessly, so I asked them if they understood -- their response was firm and enthusiastic enough that I was sure they did, and the look on their faces was shock at hearing so-called "dialetto" from a teacher, even if only one word of it.

There's also a new speech form in the inner-city high crime areas, tied to a whole lifestyle referred to as "Tasci". I was told by some that this new urban dialect was basically built on Italian rather than Sicilian.
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