Sicily

The geographical location of Sicily in the central Christians were likely to have succumbed to
Mediterranean, between the mainland areas varying degrees of Arabic-Greek bilingualism,
now referred to as Italy and Tunisia, largely while the majority of the island’s population
determined the complex linguistic history of the was Arabic speaking and Muslim. The main
island in the ancient and Medieval periods. Thus, urban environments, which were probably sub-
for most of the Classical and early Medieval ject to substantial repopulation, quickly appear
periods (ca. 835 B.C.E.–535 C.E.), dialects of to have assumed an Arab-Islamic character,
Greek and Latin came to predominate over with political and cultural life being heavily
the miscellany of tongues used by a range of concentrated in the island’s largest town,
indigenous and immigrant peoples. In addition, Palermo. In contrast, sketchy evidence suggests
Neo-Punic was also attested but to a much that inland rural areas underwent much slower
lesser extent, and only in the west of the island. processes of social, religious, and linguistic
Nonetheless, the Romano-African author assimilation. A small number of short-lived colo-
Apuleius could still speak of the Siculi trilingues nies were established on the south Italian main-
in the mid-2nd century C.E., a reference to land and possibly in Sardinia, too, while the
multilingualism that was picked up again a peripheral southerly islands of Pantelleria and
millennium later. However, on the eve of the Malta were repopulated with Arabic speakers,
Arab-Muslim invasion from Aghlabid Ifrìqiyà whose dialects would persist beyond those
that precipitated the disintegration of Byzantine of the Sicilians. Whether these islands were
rule (535–827 C.E.), forms of Sicilian Greek populated from Sicily or North Africa or both
are thought to have been the island’s main is unknown, while many of the arguments
language, although the extent to which Latinate designed to describe the relationship between
dialects had continued to coexist remains a Sicilian Arabic and Medieval Maltese have
matter of debate. proved difficult to establish with certainty.
The subsequent Muslim conquest and settle- If Berber dialects managed to survive at all in
ment not only introduced Islam as the main the crowded and competitive language situation
religion but with it Arabic as the island’s of fiercely anti-Berber Sicily, their impact has
prestigious new lingua franca. These factors left barely the faintest trace in Sicilian Arabic,
strongly determined the direction of accul- and no convincing examples can be found in
turation for both the indigenous and immigrant later Romance-based Sicilian dialects. A small
population as a colony of Ifrìqiyà under Arab- amount of Sicilian toponymy reflects Berber
Islamic rule (827–ca. 1072 C.E.). During this tribal names.
period, the Byzantine Greek church in Sicily The Norman period (ca. 1061–ca. 1194) wit-
came close to total collapse, yet there remained nessed the chaotic end to Muslim dynastic rule,
strong concentrations of Christian influence in the introduction of the Latin church, and a wide
the mixed communities of the island’s north- range of colonists from the European mainland.
eastern corner, and to some degree this is A new ruling elite began to emerge which
borne out by the mottled distribution of increasingly included ‘Latin’ Christians who
Arabic and Greek toponymy. Although there were not native to the island, as well as some
is little reason to doubt the Arabic sources’ Muslims, converts, and multilingual Christian
claim that most people converted to Islam, administrators. In addition, overwhelming num-
the remaining Christian communities, whose bers of settlers were attracted from the Italian
strong religious identity was bound up with the mainland, particularly from the northern
Greek language of their liturgy, intermittently regions covered by modern Piedmont, Liguria,
provided stiff resistance throughout the two and Lombardy. Thus, to a large extent, the
centuries of Muslim rule. Consequently, by the introduction of Arabic-speaking elites and
end of the Islamic period, many of these Sicilian colonists along with the socioreligious and

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 2 sicily

linguistic assimilation toward Arab-Islamic underpin considerations about the wider lan-
norms that had been brought by the Muslim guage situation cannot be established with
conquests were reversed in the Norman certainty, and were evidently subject to many
period. local variations.
Arabic was said by independent Medieval It is clear that even prior to the year 1100
Arabic sources (Ibn Sa≠ìd al-Maÿribì and Ibn many Muslims who could afford to had quickly
Jubayr) to be known by the Norman kings abandoned the island for the safety of North
and was prominent as the principal working Africa, al-Andalus, or Egypt. In doing so, the
language of the royal palaces and fiscal ad- island’s intellectual output in Arabic virtually
ministration. Nonetheless, in the light of a collapsed, with al-±Idrìsì and Ibn Qalàqis the most
deteriorating politico-religious situation around notable (but nonnative) authors of the Norman
the island from the 1160s, its association with period. The island’s remaining Muslims became
Islam was viewed negatively by the recent set- ever more concentrated in the regions toward
tlers and insurgent landholding classes whose the southwest of the island. A long series of
miscellaneous Italo- and Gallo-Romance dia- Muslim revolts began in 1189 and ended with
lects unambiguously identified them as adher- large-scale deportations to the colony of Lucera
ents of the Latin church. As such, the prestige on the Italian mainland during the 1220s and
of Arabic as one of the royally adopted 1240s under Frederick II. The rapid decline
languages of inscriptions, coinage, and chancery of Arabic on the island from the end of the
documents cannot always be reconciled with its 12th century was thus accelerated even further
decline outside the palaces. Similarly, Frederick during the 13th. Arabic continued to be used
II’s (d. 1250) harsh repression of the Sicilian in the large Lucera colony until its dissolution
Muslims did nothing to reduce his eclectic use in 1300, while forms of Judeo-Arabic persisted
of Oriental imports that consciously echoed his on the island until the expulsion of the Jews
Norman predecessors in Palermo. at the end of the 15th century (Rocco 1995).
The survival of a few Arabic terms in later Apart from the Jews, it is doubtful whether
Sicilian dialects (e.g. cajitu ‘local leader’ < qà±id; the remaining population of Arabic speakers,
taibbu ‘a fine wine’ < †ayyib ‘good’; defetari which now consisted of increasingly exiguous
‘record books’ < dafàtir; saia ‘water-irrigation numbers of bilingual Christians and converts
channel’ < sàqiya) suggests a degree of transitory from Islam, could have reproduced themselves
Romance-Arabic bilingualism in some quarters. for very long as Arabic-speaking communities
However, given the relatively brief (ca. 1100– on Sicily much beyond ca. 1250.
ca. 1250), antagonistic, and privileged presence Along with al-Andalus, the multilingual
of Romance-speaking Christian settlers in environment of Sicily provided a medium of
areas where the low-prestige language of the transmission for a relatively small amount
Muslims was also used, forms of Latin-Arabic of Arabic vocabulary into various modern
bilingualism were presumably short-lived by European languages. In almost all cases, these
comparison with the much longer history of consist of nouns, and most are derived from the
Greek-Arabic social intermingling, religious fields of commerce, technology, and material
conversion, acculturation, and bilingualism on culture. Although later Medieval and modern
the island (ca. 850–ca. 1250). If Muslims were Sicilian dialects are distinguished from other
assimilated into Christian communities during Italian dialects by the presence of Arabic inter-
the 12th and 13th centuries, the evidence ferences and loanwords, those elements are
points to absorption principally by their old both slight and superficial, the language having
bilingual Greek neighbors, rather than by the been effectively obliterated by events of the
immigrant, nonindigenous ‘Latin’ communities. 13th century. Most Arabic loanwords in Italo-
For their part, under renewed Christian rule of Romance dialects of the later Medieval period
the Norman period, the bilingual Arabic-Greek are nouns that relate to the fields of daily
Christians are thought to have increasingly life activities, commerce, flora, fauna, farming,
resorted back to Greek dialects, which were fishing, and physical geography (Pellegrini
becoming ever more Italo-Greek in nature. 1972; Caracausi 1983). There are relatively
However, many of the finer details of this very few adjectives or adverbial expressions,
period’s complex socioreligious history that and it might be noted that lexical items in

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 sicily 3

Italian dialects that derive from Arabic are sig- decrees, writs, a draft loan agreement, deeds
nificantly increased by inclusion of the excep- of sale and purchase, various letters patent
tional dialect of the remote island of Pantelleria. (one of which is in Judaeo-Arabic), inquest
The likelihood that some Arabic interferences proceedings, and sometimes long descriptions
and/or loan words might have been introduced of boundaries (jarà±id al-™udùd) and lists of
by migrants from the Spanish peninsula while men (jarà±id ar-rijàl) who lived on crown lands.
Sicily was under Spanish rule for 400 years until Most of the jarà±id were bilingual (Arabic-
1713 compounds the problem of describing Greek), although one significant and extensive
the relationship between Andalusi and Sici- boundary definition was composed in Arabic
lian Arabic. Indeed, the same problem of and Latin. In many cases of bilingual documents,
interference from the Iberian Peninsula cannot the Greek or Latin had been translated or
be excluded from the study of Sicilian surnames transcribed from the Arabic. The vast majority
derived from Arabic. Nor can one exclude the are available for consultation in state, regional,
largely undocumented transmission of Arabic and church archives in Sicily, although a handful
terms into Italianate dialects from the seventy of important Arabic documents are located in
thousand Italian, mainly Sicilian, workers who the Archivo de Casa Ducal de Medinaceli in
were living and working in Tunisia by the Toledo, where their availability is restricted.
1880s (where there was also a strong Maltese Almost all the Arabic charter material currently
presence), or from soldiers serving in North located in Sicily was published between 1868
Africa during the Second World War. Toward and 1882 (Cusa, Diplomi). This edition, which
the end of the 20th century, a few thousand was reprinted in 1982 without additions or
migrant workers from Tunisia have come to corrections, contains neither proper indices nor
live and work mainly around the southern translations. Moreover, it is well known to be
Sicilian ports, but they have had a negligible riddled with errors that continue to undermine
impact on the island’s main dialects to date. the reliability of attempts at investigating Sicilian
In spite of its obvious interest, the study of Arabic from a detailed linguistic perspective.
Medieval Sicilian Arabic is still in its infancy. International projects are now underway to
Scholarly pioneering efforts have now recorded produce modern critical editions of all the
and classified nonspeculative examples of Arabic material.
elements in later Sicilian dialects, and these have The Biblioteca arabo-sicula (BAS) contains
been accompanied by works seeking to outline extracts of most Medieval authors who have
the phonetic features of Sicilian Arabic and written about Sicily in Arabic. Very few of
highlight resemblances to Maltese and Andalusi these authors were native to the island, and
Arabic. Attention is now refocusing on the com- their contribution is to our understanding of
plex underlying problems of methodology and Sicily’s history, geography, and poetry rather
the need to establish reliable readings from the than its language. There is no extant Sicilian
source material, as well as a reexamination of Arabic poetry in colloquial form equivalent to
the wider language situation and the particular the Andalusi zajal. A collection of the Arabic
contexts in which the linguistic evidence occurs. inscriptions of Sicily was originally recorded by
As such, the perception of the limits and pos- Michele Amari (Le epigrafi arabiche).
sibilities surrounding these issues is likely to A single source of la™n al-±àmma ‘mistakes of
undergo continuing revision. the common people’ literature survives for Sicily,
Of written material containing some element written by Ibn Makkì, who emigrated from the
of Arabic, excluding those merely appended with island in the second half of the 11th century.
Arabic signatures or witness lists, there are 33 While his comments on the speech errors of the
extant royal dìwànì and 22 private documents ≠àmma and xàßßa are ultimately inconclusive,
(Cusa; Johns 2002:301–325). These date from he makes some intriguing observations relating
between 1095 and 1242, with the majority to morphology, hypercorrections, and gender
issued between 1133 and 1183. A few exist in switching (Agiùs 1996:123–157). However, the
fragmentary form, but almost all are in legible force of these observations remains open to
condition, being written mainly on durable interpretation.
and high-quality parchment. They consist of Many deviations from Classical Arabic norms
endowment charters, privileges, donations, that are found in Sicilian Arabic are quite

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 4 sicily

usual for the loose scribal conventions found documents in particular offer the most
in Medieval Arabic administrative texts. Not reliable opportunity to reconstruct aspects of
uncommon examples of Sicilian Middle Arabic Sicilian Arabic phonology (De Simone 1979).
include inconsistent use of the relative adjective, For example, the letters ±alif and fat™a were
the dual form, avoidance of double ±i∂àfa, consistently rendered in Greek with epsilon
and a tendency toward analytic possessive (rather than alpha), suggesting the strong
constructions (Agiùs 1996:401–403). A very presence of ±imàla (fronting of a) in Sicilian
commonly attested characteristic of Sicilian Arabic. In addition, the Greek transcriptions of
Arabic was the use of noun duplication to Arabic vowels suggest the inhibition of ±imàla
indicate extent, e.g. a†-†arìq a†-†arìq ‘right along in the environment of the emphatic consonants.
the road’. The origin of this construction may Evidence for tafxìm (velarization) is also com-
be Greek, and finds parallels in contemporary mon, and there is some suggestion that nasal-
Sicilian Latin as well as modern Sicilian ization may have been a common feature of
dialects. the island’s main 12th-century dialects. For
Given the large-scale immigration into Sicily example, we find Sicilian Arabic in©àßa ‘a
during the Arab-Islamic period, one might pear orchard’ for Classical Arabic ±ijjàßa, and
reasonably expect that Sicilian Arabic would be ™ajjàm > χαγγέμης ‘a barber’, from which the
related to whatever Arabic dialects were spoken modern Sicilian surname ‘Cangemi’ is derived.
in Aghlabid and Fatimid Ifrìqiyà, particularly in Similarly, although the Arabic letter Úà± is
the coastal towns from where most settlers seem sometimes found represented by a Greek delta,
to have originated. However, linguistic evidence rather than a zeta, this type of observation
to corroborate this is minimal, conspicuous begs questions about the phonology of Sicilian
examples being k.nìsya for kanìsa, zawj ‘two’, Greek, orthographic consistency, and the route
and m.tà± ‘belonging to’ (Sgroi 1986). Several of transmission of Sicilian Arabic elements.
variants of the Maghribi form bi-z-zàf ‘in Evidence that might have provided a means
excess, much’ are attested in Sicilian dialect to reconstruct Sicilian Arabic stress patterns
but significantly not before the 16th century. It by noting where the corresponding accent was
should also be pointed out that neither Medieval marked in Greek transliterations has proved
documents nor later dialects offer any evidence inconsistent to date.
of Maghribi aspectual markers or 1st person Sicilian Arabic is distinguished by a small
verb forms in Sicilian Arabic. Occasionally, number of loanwords and interferences from
there is found some maÿribì pointing in both South Italian Greek dialects (Caracausi 1990)
royal and private documents, although this may and Gallo-Romance (Várvaro 1981:196–204).
merely indicate the provenance of a particular According to some researchers, hybrid forms
scribe. Indeed, since the fiscal administration with Arabic and Romance elements attested
(Arabic dìwàn) of the Normans came to be in later Romance-based Sicilian dialect are
based on the offices of Fatimid Cairo, it is not evidence that Sicilian Arabic underwent varying
inconceivable that some of the scribes who degrees of pidginization and creolization of
worked in Sicily were from Egypt. One might a type which parallel linguistic developments
note, for example, in a boundary description in Maltese (Agiùs 1996). It should be noted,
of crown lands, the use of ba™rì and qiblì however, that the vast majority of examples of
to indicate ‘north’ and ‘south’. Not only is this hybrid type are attested in later Romance-
this usage particularly associated with Egypt, based Sicilian dialects or Sicilian Greek, and
but one also wonders whether ba™rì could there are doubts about the reliability and validity
ever have been used in this way on an island of arguments that seek to infer the nature
where every direction is necessarily ‘seaward’ of Sicilian Arabic anachronistically from non-
(De Simone 1986:483–484). The possibility Arabic dialects of later periods. Recent works
that non-Sicilian scribes were employed in the have raised concerns over the linguistic status of
Norman Sicilian dìwàn thus poses a threat to many of these hybrid forms since they are often
wider linguistic and diplomatic comparisons. attested in translations and transumpts written
The exceptional importance of the Arabic by scribes with a strong tendency toward code-
material in Sicily lies in the fact that many switching and whose loose concepts of how
documents are bilingual, and Arabic-Greek to write the words of one language in another

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 sicily 5

often included a capricious blend of translation Palermo: Centro di studi filologici e linguistici
and transliteration (Metcalfe 2001). This has siciliani.
Várvaro, Alberto. 1981. Lingua e storia in Sicilia
undoubtedly cast a veil over the evidence and, (dalle guerre puniche alla conquista normanna), I.
as such, the wider implications of Romance Palermo: Sellerio editore.
and/or Greek elements attested in Sicilian Ara-
bic itself, e.g. al-kh.nzàrì ‘pig farmer’ (< xinzìr + Alex Metcalfe (Lancaster University)
Romance -ari(us)), remain as intriguing as they
are uncertain.

Bibliographical references

Primary sources
BAS = Biblioteca arabo-sicula, ossia raccolta di testi
arabici. 2 vols. 2nd ed. Ed. Michele Amari and
Umberto Rizzitano. Palermo: Edizione nazionale
delle opere di Michele Amari, 1988.
Cusa, Diplomi = I diplomi greci ed arabi di Sicilia,
pubblicati nel testo originale, tradotti ed illustrati.
2 vols. Palermo, 1868–1882. (Repr., Cologne and
Vienna, 1982.)
Ibn Makkì, Taμqìf al-lisàn = Ibn Makkì, Taμqìf al-
lisàn wa-talqì™ al-janàn. Ed. ≠Abd al-≠Azìz Ma†ar.
Cairo, 1969.
Le epigrafi arabiche = Le epigrafi arabiche di Sicilia,
trascritte, tradotte, e illustrate. Parte prima:
iscrizioni edili. Palermo, 1878. (Repr., but with far
fewer plates, 1971.)

Secondary sources
Agiùs, Dionisius A. 1996. Siculo Arabic. London and
New York: Kegan Paul International.
Caracausi, Girolamo. 1983. Arabismi medievali di
Sicilia. Palermo: Centro di studi filologici e lin-
guistici siciliani.
——. 1990. Lessico greco della Sicilia e dell’Italia
meridionale (secoli X–XIV). Palermo: Centro di
studi filologici e linguistici siciliani.
De Simone, Adalgisa. 1979. Spoglio antroponomico
della giaride (ÿarà±id) arabo-greche nei Diplomi
editi da Salvatore Cusa, parte I. Roma.
——. 1986. “Su alcune corrispondenze lessicali in
diplomi arabo-latini della Sicilia medievale”. Gli
interscambi culturali e socio-economici fra l’Africa
settentrionali e l’Europa mediterranea, ed. Luigi
Serra, 469–484. Naples.
Johns, Jeremy. 2002. Arabic administration in Nor-
man Sicily: The Royal Dìwàn. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Metcalfe, Alex. 2001. “De Saracenico in Latinum
transferri: Causes and effects of translation in the
fiscal administration of Norman Sicily”. Al-Masàq:
Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 13.43–86.
——. 2003. Muslims and Christians in Norman
Sicily: Arabic speakers and the end of Islam. Lon-
don and New York: RoutledgeCurzon.
Pellegrini, Giovan Battista. 1972. Gli arabismi nelle
lingue neolatine, con speciale riguardo all’Italia. 2
vols. Brescia: Paideia editore.
Rocco, Benedetto. 1995. “Le tre lingue usate dagli
ebrei in Sicilia dal sec. XII al sec. XV’’. Italia
Judaica 5.355–369.
Sgroi, Salvatore. 1986. Interferenze fonologici, morfo-
sintattiche e lessicali fra l’arabo e il siciliano.

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