On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Not to be confused with Silesian language. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Romance language that is spoken sicilian cannoli the island of Sicily and its satellite islands.

A sign in Sicilian at Santo Stefano di Camastra, Messina. Sicilian is spoken by most inhabitants of Sicily and by emigrant populations around the world. Sicilian of the medieval Sicilian school, academics have developed a standardized form. In the 20th century, researchers at the Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani developed an extensive descriptivist orthography which aims to represent every sound in the natural range of Sicilian accurately.

In 2017, the nonprofit organisation Cademia Siciliana created an orthographic proposal to help to normalise the language’s written form. The autonomous regional parliament of Sicily has legislated Regional Law No. 2011 to encourage the teaching of Sicilian at all schools, but inroads into the education system have been slow. A Sicilian American man speaking Sicilian. The language is officially recognized in the municipal statutes of some Sicilian towns, such as Caltagirone and Grammichele, in which the “inalienable historical and cultural value of the Sicilian language” is proclaimed. The first term refers to the fact that a form of Sicilian is spoken in southern Calabria, particularly in the province of Reggio Calabria. Dante Alighieri, De Vulgari Eloquentia, Lib.

Sicily was occupied by various populations. The earliest of these populations were the Sicanians, considered to be autochthonous. The Sicels and the Elymians arrived between the second and first millennia BC. The following table, listing words for “twins”, illustrates the difficulty linguists face in tackling the various substrata of the Sicilian language. A similar qualifier can be applied to many of the words that appear in this article. Sometimes it may be known that a particular word has a prehistoric derivation, but it is not known whether the Sicilians inherited it directly from the indigenous populations, or whether it came via another route.