The Sicilian Language (lu sicilianu)
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This video is a language profile on the Sicilian language, which is spoken in Sicily (and a couple other places in southern Italy). I introduce the features of Sicilian through examples, side by side with Italian. I think you'll see that it's a distinct Italo-Romance language, while being generally similar to Standard Italian.
Special thanks to Giacomo Messina for his Sicilian and Italian audio samples, suggestions, and feedback!
And a great big thanks to all of you patrons:
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So excited to see this!! There’s not enough out there about Sicily and the Sicilian language <3
i see Paul has been making videos on the languages of Italy which is nice since i’ve been learning italian and i started having interest for these languages. I hope you’ll be able to make videos on the other languages of Italy like: ligurian,piedmontese,friulian,etc
As a portuguese speaker I noticed lots of similarities in pronunciation and articles between portuguese and sicilian
yes, to me Sicilian sounded closer to Portuguese and Italian closer to Spanish
Several Italian dialects/local languages could be perceived phonetically closer to Portuguese. After all, Portuguese is similar to Italian and Spanish but with extra vowel-sounds, just like several Italian dialects. The one that sounds closer to Portuguese is Genovese.
Remember that most masculine nouns and adjectives in singular accusative case end in -um. In the vulgar Latin that ending became -u soon. So it´s not rare to find masculine nouns and adjectives ending in (u) sound in Sicilian, Corsican, Sardinian, Arromanian, Romanian, Asturleonese, and Portuguese.
Especially with final [o] softening into [u]
@@juandiegovalverde1982 Huh? You mean it’s NOT rare…? All masculine nouns practically end in [u].
I am Sicilian and I would say that I speak about 90% Italian and 10% Sicilian. Sad, but true. I don’t usually have full conversations in Sicilian, I speak basically Italian and put some sicilian words and sentences in there. But I come from a city, in the villages the situation is a little bit different.
There is a mistake in the video: we don’t “prefer” the passato remoto, we just have an only, synthetical past form that could be called preateritum just like in Latin. To say “I did” we can only say “fici”, a form like “aiu fattu” just doesn’t exist. By the way I wouldn’t say “chianta” for “plant” but “rasta” which comes from Greek.
I hope you keep this wonderful language going. Sicily is definately on my bucket list and I plan to learn a some Sicilian before I go. That way, if someone speaks to me in Italian, I can answer “nun capisciu”.
That would be weird, man. And Sicilian has got a lot of different varieties and no standard. But if you want to learn something for fun, why not
You’re right: “gelu” is a Latin word (fourth declension for neuter nouns); perhaps the Arabic “jala” comes from “gelu”, but not the other way around.
Where I’m from we use both “Rasta” and “macchia”
I’m pretty sure “Rasta” refers to a house plant while “macchia” Is a plant in general
I am from Messina, we don’t have “macchia” here
2:33 gelu (or jelu) does not come from Arabic, it comes from Latin gelu (frost) which gave the word for frost in French (gel), Romanian (ger), Italian (gelo), Sardinian (ghelu/belu in north gelu in south) etc, and for ice in Portuguese (gelo), Spanish (hielo), Catalan (gel), Occitan (gèl) etc
It seems like every video I make has one thing that people correct me on every day for 10 years. This will be that one thing in this video.
@@Langfocus#engagement
Thanks for posting!
And also Germanic words cold, kalt, etc. come from the same PIE root.
@@LangfocusWhen a video has dozens of comments all saying the same thing, I often wonder if the commenters didn’t see the other comments for some reason, or if they just didn’t bother to check if anyone else had already said it.
@DavidCowie2022 Yeah, I think that’s right. They probably take a quick look but don’t see any comments about it, so they add one. But further down the page there are comments about it.
The Sicilian accattari is cognate with the French acheter, which also means to buy.
Yes, that’s the first thing I thought when I saw/heard it.
Thanks for this video, Paul. I’ve been waiting for what feels like decades for you to do one on Sicilian! 🙂
I want to also share an interesting fact: “accattari” can even mean to give birth! I’m not sure the reason for this. In an ironic way, it’s the opposite meaning of the USA English expression “ ‘to buy’ the farm” (death)!
In Portuguese, “catar” is to scavenge and “acatar” to comply.
Accattari is also cognate with Piedmontese caté, with the same meaning.
As a native Sicilian (western Sicily) now living in northern Italy, I don’t speak Sicilian very often, even though I’m perfectly fluent. Even when talking to other native Sicilians, I tend to use Italian, especially with strangers. If it’s close people (family, friends), I often use Sicilian, but usually, it’s a mix of Italian and Sicilian. As the guest explained in your video, from a young age, we are often told to speak Italian, and Sicilian is not taught in school. This makes someone who speaks only Sicilian, especially with strangers, come across as uneducated.
Cultural suicide. Sad.
That’s a horrible mindset to have. This is exactly how languages die, because you seem to have an inferiority complex when talking about your MOTHER tongue for god sakes. Preserve the language, and do not feel ashamed to speak it, pass it on. Speak Sicilian with other Sicilians. Have a good day
Give it another generation and there will be people trying to revive Sicilian and wonder why people ever let it fade away. It would be nice if you could just skip that and encourage bilingualism
This how how the language of my ethnic group is dying,speak Sicilian with your fellow sicialians man. You won’t regret it
Sicilian is a beautiful language. Let it live!
Langfocus, when my grandfathers family of my maternal side migrated from the Mediterranean to Puerto Rico 325 years ago, I discovered that the receiving authority registering his family ashore off the ship translated our Sicilian into Italian. Because my mother said to me audibly what our name is, while your presentation allowed me to realize the sounds of it, and deduced the translation of our Sicilian to Italian, and thus what went down on paper in written form (ending up written in Italian rather than its original Sicilian).
You helped me by showing the Latin, the corresponding Italian, and, the corresponding Sicilian.
For us it is the Palermu sound with double d; “dd” (dz), having been mistranslated as “ll” .
Thanks Sir!!!
You probably know this, but I’ll bring up just in case that the /ɖʐ/ sound shown in the video for Sicilian ⟨dd⟩ is also one of the possible sounds used to pronounce ⟨ll⟩ in Spanish, particularly in the Costa Rican dialect.
Hi everyone! I hope you like the video! There’s one error in the video that I want to point out: gelu is apparently not a word of Arabic origin. It comes from Latin gelū.
Thanks for the explanation
Thalj is the Arabic word, so is Sorbets. Gelu is Latin for sure.
Ha, I was just starting to write a comment about that when I noticed the correction. 😻
Can’t wait for Metatron Academy to react to this!
It’s all good Paul, we still love you! Keep up the great work 👍🏻
Sicilian-American who grew up listening to my grandparents speak Sicilian (they never really spoke Italian), and man this is the video I’ve been waiting for for years, thank you!
Such a great voice and accent that Sicilian guy ! As Italian myself, I can certainly say he has the greatest pronunciation! 😉 Very good job!
As a Sicilian man from Siracusa, I can tell you that since I was a child my parents recommended me of not speaking Sicilian because it could sound rude in many situations and I would have made confusion with the Italian Language. Today I normally speak Sicilian only in a few occasions and also I don’t feel very comfortable on speaking it. For replying to the second question, well I think that this language is continuosly mixing with Italian, daily we speak Italian with some words of Sicilian in a normal speach. This may lead to making confusion, believing that some words are 100% Italians(but they are not). The Sicilian spoken by old generations is pretty different from the present one, and when I hear my grandparent speaking ,not always I can understand them. If you go to villages or small towns you might find different situations, I mean people use more Sicilian than Italian or a different level of mix. When I used to attend the school, we had a course about the Greek,Arabic,…’s influences on our language , for building a knowledge of our identity. Unfortunatly I think these kinds of courses are not available anymore or they have been replaced with other subjects. To be honest, I agree with the Unesco: this language is truly on a risk.
Anyway thanks for your job man, I really appreciate your efforts!!
My family immigrated from Siracusa to Germany. And my grandparents told my parents not to teach us Sicilian because they thought other Italians could think that we are uneducated. So I’ve neither learned sicilian nor Italian, but I understand a lot.
I’m a third-generation Sicilian-American. My grandparents & parents spoke what they called Italian, but was really Sicilian. I asked them why they didn’t teach me “Italian”, and they said they didn’t want me to be discriminated against because they thought it would give me an accent when I spoke English. When I started to learn standard Italian as an adult, I went home, I spoke Italian to them & they didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. My ethnic DNA is a walking history book of Sicily. 64% Greco-Italian, 9% Ashkenazi Jewish, 9% Arabic, a bit of African, North European, Spanish & even a bit of South Asian.
Most of us in the south of Italy have a big mix of south Italian – greek, Ashkenazi and various Mediterranean bits and bobs. I have always wondered why most of us have that relevant Ashkenazi… I would love to know if you might know.
@@Earthstorm84 The so-called Ashkenazi and Arab admixture could be from the ancient Phoenicians.
@ Partially, the Arabs ruled & were present as were the Jews for 100’s of years in Sicily during the Middle Ages.
Hi! I’m a 72 years old bilingual men, italian and portuguese, also relatively fluent in french, spanish and english. One of the sad facts I remember from my childhood is that when my grandfather spoke to me in his local language, milanese, the only language he knew, I understood near nothing. Today I understand near 95% of milanese, as well as sicilian, neapolitan, venetian, catalan. But I find very sad that today the most part of the younger citizens of Milan not only can not speak the milanese language, but also they do not understand it. The same phenomena occurs, more or less, with sicilians, neapolitans, sardinians, corses, guascons, provençals. The local languages, unfortunately, are in serious risk of extinction. I think ta within
50 years the local langages could be probably lost forever.
In Spain we preserve Catalan, Euskera, Aranese (Gascon), and Galician. We have to protect Asturleonese and Aragonese now.
This happened not only because the government does nothing to protect regional languages, but also due to massive immigration from the south of Italy and from abroad, so that there are very few people in Milan who have real Milanese roots.
One of the reasons why southern regional languages are more widespread is that the south saw less immigration
I’m a native sicilian speaker, I only speak sicilian with my family at home, at school sicilian is not used unless by some old teachers. Actually my pronunciation of sicilian is very different from the other dialects mentioned in the video (it’s the Comiso dialect) and is more similar to spanish. For example we pronunce “ch” like the spanish. We say “a ciave” and we don’t say “a kiave”. Also many words are almost (if not) identical to spanish like “a cucchara” for spoon
Edit: For some time I lived in Tuscany and when I was there people couldn’t understand me even if I spoke to them in Italian. Also I tried to speak to them in sicilian but they couldn’t understand me either even if I thought the words were similar
As a Latino American who speaks Spanish (not fluently but well enough) and some basic Italian, I noticed when I traveled through Italy people would ask me if I was from Spain or speaking Spanish because i would instinctively pronounce things closer to Spanish. This, I believe, caused some people to not understand me even if I was “using the right words”. Eventually I was able to make sense of things but it happened often – especially from Rome northward.
Paul, thank you so much for making this video on Sicilianu. I’ve been waiting for years for it! 👏🏼
Such as rich language full of culture and history. Thank you for the long awaited lesson and overview!
💯
Is a Spanish speaker, it’s fascinating how much linguistic diversity there is on the Italian Peninsula and islands
Well, since I know Sicilian fairly well—but being Tunisian myself (from Tunis)—I’ve noticed that some Sicilian words are used in the Tunis dialect, and vice versa. For example, the word for ‘wife’ is ‘el marra’ (with a rolled ‘R’), but in a more familiar context, we use ‘moojirra,’ which comes from the Spanish ‘mujer’ and is very similar to the Sicilian word! I think sharing so much history has led to many linguistic similarities…
Sicilianu is thriving still, a lot more than the languages of north, as an example. But not as much as Napulitano.
Videos like these will contribute to their on-going survival for years to come.