Le lingue, ponti o frontiere? Appunti sulla Sicilia linguistica / Languages, bridges or borders? Notes on linguistics Sicily

The Sicilian language has always been a field of great interest not only because of its contact with other languages, but also because of ideological models and language policies. This paper examines some moments of its thousand-year history in which the intermingling of peoples, languages and cultures has been acted out in very different ways, both in terms of actual behaviour and in terms of perceptions and linguistic representations. After outlining some recent studies of great interest, chiefly because of the approaches and methodologies used, the paper analyses the changes in the repertoire of the inhabitants of Sicily in recent decades. In particular, we examine the practices of the very recent use of dialect in the written communication of youth, in politics and in advertising, and the unmistakeable opening up to the multilingualism of immigrants arriving from around the globe. Indeed, they are the ones changing the face of Sicilian cities, perhaps rebinding those historical links of connections and fusion, contacts and overlaps between people and languages.