marcin
(Marcin)
#1
writing is studded with French expressions.
Here is the description of the princess of
Ganci, who came to visit the writer’s
grandmother, called Granmamà, her
mother-in-law:
She was a delicate figure who called to
mind the statuettes in blanc de Chine. She
spoke, or rather stuttered, a strange mixture
of Sicilian and French pronouncing the “R”s
as if they were “S”s: “carissima” became
“casissima” and “il parco della Favorita” “Il
pascu d’a Favosita.”^2
The situation appears radically different
after W.W. II; the impoverishment of the
linguistic patrimony of dialect affects the
whole peninsula and corrodes the solidity of
the Sicilian dialect. The rapid erosion of
dialects surprises P. P. Pasolini; regarding
Buttitta’s heartfelt lamentation in the poem
“Lingua e dialettu” [Language and Dialect],