Acerca de la heterogeneidad léxica del siciliano contemporáneo: Influjos griego, árabe y otras influencias menores

Abstract

Even if the use of Sicilian has been linked to traditional lore on too many occasions, Sicilian has been a decisive language in the development of the Sicilian people, a community that still uses it nowadays as a sign of identity. As a matter of fact, the use of Sicilian is more and more frequent in contemporary insular literature, which represents a reappraisal of an Italic linguistic variant that reflects in a true, reliable way the defining linguistic features of Sicily. Aware of this situation, the introduction of this article highlights the linguistic and cultural relevance of Sicilian, conspicuous in it being used by the main intellectuals of the island. This is the literary technique that is present in L’Assaggiatrice (2007), the debut work of Giuseppina Torregrossa, an author who uses this book to portray her homeland from a linguistic viewpoint, including Sicilian words both from a Romance origin as well as others coming from Greek, Arabic and other lesser sources. The methodology followed is based on the detection and compilation of the Sicilian dialect expressions used by Torregrossa in L’Assaggiatrice, words analyzed from a semantic and etymological perspective that have revealed the extent to which Greek, Arabic, Turkish and Gothic influences –without neglecting items of unknown origin or formed from onomatopoeia– have been key to the current lexical configuration of the island.