Dialect Poetry of Southern Italy (Italian Poetry in Translation Book 2)

SICILY

At the beginning of the century, Sicilian

dialect could be considered the unofficial

language of a people and territory. For the

lower classes it represented virtually the

only linguistic code in use, nor was the

“Sicilian tongue” perceived as diminutio: the

national language remained an expression of

other realities, both geographic and social: it

was the language of the rich (as diabetes was

regarded a disease of the rich) and of the

North: of people from the “continent.”

Illiteracy in Sicily reached extremes of

70.89% in the demographic census of 1901, of

56.97% the next decade, as compared to a

national average that reached, respectively,

48.49% and 37.43%.^1 If after the draft a

recruit tended to reproduce extraneous