[12] The latter are found in the countries that attracted large numbers of Sicilian immigrants during the course of the past century or so, especially the United States (specifically in the Gravesend and Bensonhurst neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York City, and in Buffalo and Western New York State), Canada (especially in Montreal, Toronto and Hamilton), Australia, Venezuela and Argentina.

During the last four or five decades, large numbers of Sicilians were also attracted to the industrial zones of Northern Italy and areas of the European Union.

[citation needed] 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.

[16] This system is also used extensively in the Vocabolario siciliano and by Gaetano Cipolla in his Learn Sicilian series of textbooks[17] and by Arba Sicula in its journal.

In initially 2017, with an updated version in 2024 the nonprofit organisation Cademia Siciliana created an orthographic proposal to help to normalise the language's written form.

Since 2009, it has been taught at the Italian Charities of America, in New York City (home to the largest Sicilian speaking community outside of Sicily and Italy)[27][28] and it is also preserved and taught by family association, church organisations and societies, social and ethnic historical clubs and even Internet social groups, mainly in Gravesend and Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

[45] The following table, listing words for "twins", illustrates the difficulty linguists face in tackling the various substrata of the Sicilian language.

[45] Bearing in mind the qualifiers mentioned above (alternative sources are provided where known), examples of such words include: There are also Sicilian words with an ancient Indo-European origin that do not appear to have come to the language via any of the major language groups normally associated with Sicilian, i.e. they have been independently derived from a very early Indo-European source.

Many Germanic influences date back to the time of the Swabian kings (amongst whom Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor enjoyed the longest reign).

Words that probably originate from this era include: In 535, Justinian I made Sicily a Byzantine province, which returned the Greek language to a position of prestige, at least on an official level.

[55] This is understandable because of the Arab Agricultural Revolution; the Saracens introduced to Sicily their advanced irrigation and farming techniques and a new range of crops, nearly all of which remain endemic to the island to this day.

While a form of Vulgar Latin clearly survived in isolated communities during the Islamic epoch,[citation needed] there is much debate as to the influence it had (if any) on the development of the Sicilian language, following the re-Latinisation of Sicily (discussed in the next section).

[citation needed] By AD 1000, the whole of what is today Southern Italy, including Sicily, was a complex mix of small states and principalities, languages and religions.

[54] The whole of Sicily was controlled by Saracens, at the elite level, but the general population remained a mix of Muslims and Christians who spoke Greek, Latin or Siculo-Arabic.

The Principality of Salerno was controlled by Lombards (or Langobards), who had also started to make some incursions into Byzantine territory and had managed to establish some isolated independent city-states.

Even to the present day, Gallo-Italic of Sicily exists in the areas where the Northern Italian colonies were the strongest, namely Novara, Nicosia, Sperlinga, Aidone and Piazza Armerina.

[54] The Siculo-Gallic dialect did not survive in other major Italian colonies, such as Randazzo, Caltagirone, Bronte and Paternò (although they influenced the local Sicilian vernacular).

[74] The influence of the school and the use of Sicilian itself as a poetic language was acknowledged by the two great Tuscan writers of the early Renaissance period, Dante and Petrarch.

Following the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, the kingdom came under the influence of the Crown of Aragon,[75] and the Catalan language (and the closely related Aragonese) added a new layer of vocabulary in the succeeding century.

[77] While it is often difficult to determine whether a word came directly from Catalan (as opposed to Occitan), the following are likely to be such examples: By the time the crowns of Castille and Aragon were united in the late 15th century, the Hispanicisation and Italianisation of written Sicilian in the parliamentary and court records had commenced.

[83] This process has quickened since World War II due to improving educational standards and the impact of mass media, such that increasingly, even within the family home, Sicilian is not necessarily the language of choice.

[54] Unstressed /i/ and /u/ generally undergo reduction to [ɪ] and [ʊ] respectively, except in word-/phrase-final position, as in [pʊsˈsibbɪli] ‘possible’ and [kʊˈniɟɟu] ‘rabbit’.

That has also happened when there was once an initial /e/ and, to a lesser extent, /a/ and /o/: mpurtanti "important", gnuranti "ignorant", nimicu "enemy", ntirissanti "interesting", llustrari "to illustrate", mmàggini "image", cona "icon", miricanu "American".

However, after a nasal consonant or if it is triggered by syntactic gemination, it is pronounced [ɟ] as in un jornu with [nɟ] or tri jorna ("three days") with [ɟɟ].

[109] Extracts from three of Sicily's more celebrated poets are offered below to illustrate the written form of Sicilian over the last few centuries: Antonio Veneziano, Giovanni Meli and Nino Martoglio.

(c. 1575–1580) (~1790) (~1900; trans: A game of Briscula amongst friends)[116] As one of the most spoken languages of Italy, Sicilian has notably influenced the Italian lexicon.

[121] Outside Sicily and Southern Calabria, there is an extensive Sicilian-speaking diaspora living in several major cities across South and North America and in other parts of Europe and Australia, where Sicilian has been preserved to varying degrees.

The Sicilian-American organization Arba Sicula publishes stories, poems and essays, in Sicilian with English translations, in an effort to preserve the Sicilian language, in Arba Sicula, its bi-lingual annual journal (latest issue: 2017), and in a biennial newsletter entitled Sicilia Parra.