The Growing Movement to Save the Sicilian Language

Something big is unfolding in Sicily, and no, it’s not a new season of White Lotus.

There is a saying in Sicilian: Biatu ḍḍu aceḍḍu chi fa lu nidu a lu so pajisi. It means, loosely, “It’s a lucky bird who gets to build his nest in the same land he came from.” Those of us from an emigrant background will immediately recognize the poignancy of this statement—how brave, or desperate, that generation must have been to venture out and leave the only place they’d ever known. For some, the sense of rootlessness is hereditary, so that we, their children and grandchildren, can sometimes still feel stuck between two places. “What a luxury it must be to simply belong somewhere,” I sometimes think to myself.

But what if staying behind wasn’t enough? What if your country was changing around you, making you a stranger in your own land? This is, in some ways, what occurred in Sicily, and many parts of Southern Italy, during the post-war boom that began in the 1960s, after many of our parents and grandparents had already left. You see, the very language was changing. For centuries, the island’s commonfolk and the elites alike had spoken Sicilian, a language so old it inspired Dante. Although Italian had been adopted long ago as the language of administration and written records, Sicilian, with a literary history stretching back to the 1200s, was no slouch. In fact, the dominance of the Sicilian language on the island persisted a hundred years or so after the Unification of Italy in 1861. But today it is relegated to the home, if spoken at all. So what happened to make the language go from vital to vulnerable in a few short decades?

In short, the invention of mass media. First the radio, and then especially the television, brought the Italian language into spheres of life where it had previously never ventured. In fact, at unification, it’s estimated that less than three percent of the population of Italy spoke Italian fluently and only 10 percent spoke it at all. As universal education was expanded and literacy grew, more and more people gained some knowledge of Italian, but there was still no spoken standard. Instead, people pronounced it according to the accent and tonality of their native dialect. With the advent of regular radio broadcasts in 1924, Italy’s national broadcaster, the RAI [Radiotelevisione italiana] needed to solve the question of pronunciation. They settled on the model of “lingua toscana in bocca romana,” or the Roman pronunciation with many of the idiosyncratic features of the Tuscan dialects stripped out. The resulting “emended Tuscan” became the standard for broadcasts, and was pumped into homes throughout the country, further tightening its grip on the nation when television was introduced thirty years later, in 1954, and quickly establishing itself as the only standard pronunciation.

For the first time, a whole generation grew up immersed in the new Standard Italian. With the RAI’s airtight monopoly on the correct pronunciation and the intense pressure to master the language to take advantage of the economic opportunities afforded by the post-war boom, upwardly mobile parents actively sought to shield their children from the dialects, lest they develop an accent and be forever labeled contadini, or worse, terroni. The massive internal migrations from the South to the industrial centres of the North accelerated this, with mixed marriages and a desire to integrate, giving people an impetus to drop their native dialects. Not only were children discouraged from speaking the dialects, but in many cases, parents actively avoided using the dialects around their children, enacting a sort of linguistic shift within the household and cutting them off from their heritage.

It’s no exaggeration to say this has caused a generational break. We often roll our eyes at the younger generation of Italian-Canadians who haven’t bothered to learn Italian and either can’t understand their grandparents or, almost worse, answer them in English when spoken to in Italian. But much the same thing happens in Italy today. In some cases, the younger generation can barely understand their grandparents, who speak dialect. If they do understand, they tend to answer in Italian. How can a culture survive and be passed on if its primary vehicle, the language, has radically shifted?

Those of us who grew up in Quebec are no strangers to this type of linguistic soul searching. We know that language is closely tied to identity and self-conception, and we are used to seeing such concerns debated, and even legislated. But we are not alone—notions of language and identity have long been bubbling under the surface in Italy, and these are precisely the kinds of questions Sicilians are now beginning to ask themselves, thanks in no small part to an Italian-American from Texas.

Nick Panzarella remembers hearing Sicilian spoken at home in suburban Houston by his dad, but he couldn’t speak the language. As he explains it, “my father raised us speaking English with some Sicilian words mixed in. We thought they were Italian words, but everything ended with [the letter] ‘u’, and we later realized they were Sicilian.” Panzarella taught himself Italian as a teenager, but it was while visiting some Sicilian relatives in a small town near Cefalù that he realized many of his cousins didn’t speak Italian at home and some of them didn’t really speak Italian at all.

The desire to understand his roots and connect with his family led him to teach himself Sicilian – using the few resources available at the time, and through immersion during family vacations. During an extended stint in Palermo, he was struck by the refusal of the people around him to engage and practice Sicilian. But it was only in 2022, with the impending birth of his son, that he redoubled his efforts and got involved in advocacy work. Having always planned to raise his child in Italian, he now felt it imperative to pass down knowledge of the Sicilian language as well. His renewed drive to master the language put him in contact with language campaigners from Sicily and the diaspora alike.

Activists like Panzarella believe the language needs protection. They want it declared co-official with Italian in the region of Sicily and taught in schools. Panzarella takes things a step further: “People in Italy don’t really understand at first. We’re not just saying the language should be taught in schools, we’re saying, ‘Why not teach math in Sicilian?’ When they finally get it, their heads explode!”

While there is a consensus among linguists and scholars outside Italy that Sicilian is a full-fledged language, it’s often very hard to get Italian academics to agree. Dialectology is still viewed by the establishment as the purview of Italianists and Dante scholars. Modern generative linguistic theories have been slow to take hold, and any talk of dialects is so inextricably intertwined with notions of class, regionalism, and national identity as to make dispassionate debate a non-starter.

In fact, despite paying a lot of lip service to the idea of dialects as a “language of the heart” or their deep connection to the soil, the Italian establishment can be dismayingly dismissive of local languages. While they’ve come a long way in accepting that the so-called “dialects” are not really bastardized forms of Italian but actually organic local evolutions of late Latin, Italian academics stop short of endorsing the term “language” to refer to these speech forms.

Lately, they have taken to a complex theory that designates Italian as the so-called “roof language,” arguing that, since basically all speakers of local languages also speak Italian, it remains the only “dialect” in Italy that can be considered a full-fledged language. This line of thinking ignores the existence of dialect speakers abroad who might not know Italian well. These speakers’ “roof language” might be English, French, or Spanish, and yet they are able to communicate just fine with fellow dialect speakers back in Italy, which means the dialects, although subject to a lot of pressure from Italian as the official language, are independent systems of communication.

Although it’s been a struggle to get the Italian government to recognize the legitimacy and importance of local minority languages, the movement has been more successful at the regional level. Today, Sicily is the only one of Italy’s five autonomous regions that does not grant any official status to the local language—as opposed to Friuli-Venezia Giulia (German, Slovene, Friulian), Trentino-Alto Adige (German, Ladin), Val d’Aosta (French, Franco-Provençal), and Sardinia (Sard), where these languages are officially recognized and taught in schools. But a growing movement aims to change that.

Panzarella’s organization, the Cademia Siciliana, has been working to address exactly this issue. Starting in 2017, they published a guide for writing in Sicilian to encourage people to think beyond the borders of their own paese. Whereas Italian has a rigid standard set by the Accademia della Crusca, the Sicilian Cademia’s own system is more flexible. As the organization’s explainer document describes, it’s inspired more by English and French, where the written language doesn’t have to track so closely to the spoken language; this allows the writing system to encompass more dialects. Panzarella offers an example, “take the English word ‘new’: some speakers pronounce it /noo/, while others pronounce it /nyoo/. In Italian, one would be spelled nu and the other, gnù, and the experts would say they represent two totally different dialects.” But such linguistic variation is normal, linguists say, and the Cademia’s writing system takes account of it.

Critics of the Cademia’s approach argue that it flattens regional differences and risks endangering local varieties of Sicilian by forcing everyone to adopt the same literary version of the language. Panzarella refutes this as a mischaracterization. He claims that the Cademia rejects the idea of standardization, preferring to talk of “normalization.” As he explains, “our work is focused solely on how people write, not how they speak—the writing system we promote is elastic.” It’s a matter, he says, of giving speakers the tools they need to write their native tongue while allowing for mutual comprehension between varieties and giving speakers a linguistic identity with which to relate.

The Cademia runs a polished social media campaign, collaborating with the growing legion of Sicilian-language content creators. Some are biting, like Ilaria Cassibba. On her popular Instagram channel, @sicilian_with_ilaria, she teaches common Sicilian words and phrases in English, mainly to an Italian-American audience. She also teaches private lessons and has a Sicilian-language podcast. Ilaria is from Modica, in the province of Ragusa, and she speaks a dialect from the Hyblaean Mountains that has some unique characteristics that set it apart from other Sicilian varieties. Nonetheless, she sees the importance of a shared writing system, and she recently partnered with the Cademia to produce a Sicilian language course that will show how even her dialect can be written using their orthography.

In March, the Cademia and its allies helped stage a demonstration in Palermo in support of granting co-official status to the Sicilian language. The movement appears to be picking up steam, with several comuni voting to push the regional government to recognize the language and a new bill currently before the Sicilian Parliament demanding that Italy add Sicilian to its list of officially protected minority languages—a request the central authorities are likely to grant, given Sicily’s autonomous status.

In response to the rising call for Sicilian to be elevated to co-official status, a group of Sicilian academics have published a letter in protest. Their argument is that, while Sicilian is fine for chit-chatting around the dinner table or discussing the latest soccer scores at the bar, the language could never be used to discuss complex topics. Nor could it be taught in schools, because it lacks any form of standardization or a written norm.

“It’s a chicken-and-egg question,” says Panzarella. “The language is not normalized because there are no formal contexts in which to use the language; right now, no one is publishing a newspaper in Sicilian because no one knows how a newspaper in Sicilian is supposed to be written.” To the detractors who say the movement is trying to politicize the language, he has this to say: “If you believe there is value in something, you’ve got to make a decision and just do it. Sitting back and twiddling your thumbs while Sicilian’s sphere of use shrinks and the language eventually dies—that is a political act, too.”

As for the point about the dialect not being able to express complex thoughts, one can’t help but think that’s a bias that the current generation of Italian academics are disproportionately likely to fall prey to due to their specific background. The parents of the baby boomer generation were the first in Italy to make a conscious effort to speak Italian with their kids and withhold knowledge of the dialect. Today, you rarely meet an academic in the field of Italian dialectology in Italy who is truly fluent in any dialect other than Standard Italian. If they exist, they’re usually based outside Italy (in fact, the biggest centres for Italian dialectology are Leiden, in the Netherlands, and Oxford and Cambridge, in England, as well as several centres throughout North America where researchers are not beholden to the Italian establishment’s dogmas). Only someone who is not fluent in dialect would think that it can’t be used to express complex thoughts about government, society, science, or the arts.

But some opponents of the push to recognize the Sicilian language have more prosaic concerns. Many have argued that the region’s limited resources should be directed where they are needed most, especially to healthcare and education. They argue that, with the region’s poor educational outcomes, any additional investments in education should go to reinforcing the basics like the three Rs: reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic. They say that introducing Sicilian language classes would further mess with a student body that is already precarious and underserved.

As pioneers of bilingual education and language immersion, we in Quebec actually have a fair bit of evidence to the contrary. Certainly, we know that children with learning difficulties can struggle with bilingual classroom environments. But, overall, there are massive benefits to learning a second language in childhood. The benefits ripple through decades, going so far as to help prevent dementia and slow cognitive decline in old age. We know that kids who learn more than one language in childhood have better working memory, executive function, and problem-solving ability. They are more resilient and adaptable. And, far from confusing them, bilingualism helps strengthen their knowledge of both languages to a higher level than if they’d learnt either language on its own.

“Why not learn English, then,” detractors say, “or German? Languages that will actually help these students thrive and compete in a global marketplace.” The reason is simple: about 70 percent of Sicilians report using primarily Sicilian at home and with friends. It is their mother tongue. And for decades now, they have been going to school in a second language and wondering why they don’t succeed as well as some of their peers in other regions of Italy.

The right of children to receive schooling in their mother tongue is sacrosanct, and for good reason. Not only does it support better and faster development of literacy, improved learning transfer (the ability to apply what you’ve learnt to a new situation), and stronger critical reasoning skills, but it also leads to higher academic achievement, lower dropout rates, and improved second-language learning ability—precisely the things detractors are asking the region to focus on!

But the benefits of mother-tongue education go beyond statistics. To see one’s language elevated to the medium of instruction is ennobling; it results in greater confidence and a stronger sense of self-worth. Rather than teaching children that the language they’ve inherited is flawed and broken, it teaches them that they are whole and worthy of love, affection, and esteem. It is good for the soul. In other words, È bonu pi l’ànima!

 

Nick Panzarella’s advice for parents who want to raise their child with Italian or any minority language: “The simplest thing is to speak to them in the language—don’t teach it like they’re in school or talk about the language in English, just use the language directly with them regularly. If you’re not confident with your skills, find something to read to them every day in the language. At the end of so many years they’ll have a really solid base in the language. Even if you’re not fully fluent, you only need to be able to read and pronounce the words; the problem with a language like Sicilian is we’re under-resourced and we don’t have a lot of children’s books. But we’re hoping to change that. Every year there is something new out there.”

 

Jordan Black is a linguist and Italian dialectologist from Montreal who grew up speaking the dialect of Larino, Campobasso. He holds a master’s degree in linguistics from the University of Oxford and runs @LengaLonga, an Instagram account dedicated to the dialects of Molise. He is interested in language planning and minority language preservation.