El superestrato románico: La huella del español, del francés y del occitano en el siciliano contemporáneo

Abstract

Sicily has always been a territory under dispute by multiple peoples that eventually managed to mold the culture of the inhabitants of the island. As a result, the Sicilian language absorbed the language of the ensuing settlers, particularly Spanish and French. In view of this, this article addresses the analysis of the Spanish, French and Occitan traces, three Romance variants that, through the semantic superstratum, have had an impact on the linguistic configuration of the Sicilian language. With the focus on the dialectal lexicon used by the Palermitan writer, Giuseppina Torregrossa, in her debut novel, L’Assaggiatrice, this study confirms what previous specialized autho-rities on the field observed in past times: that the Ibero-Romance and Gallo-Romance influence have been, and still are, key to the shaping of the Sicilian language, a linguistic variant that is most frequently used in insular literature regardless of the growing social interest in standard Italian after the unification.