Sicily has been ruled by nearly every great power of the Mediterranean world, and every one of them left words behind. The Sicilian dialect is not a degraded form of Italian — it is a sedimentary record of conquest, absorption, and survival, layer pressed upon layer across three thousand years.
Language as a Map of Domination
Standard Italian descends from Tuscan Latin, refined by poets and bureaucrats in the north. Sicilian — u dialettu — descends from something far older and far more contested. Linguists classify it as a Romance language in its own right, not merely a regional accent. Its grammar diverges sharply from Italian in ways that only make sense when you trace who was standing on the island and issuing orders at any given century.
The island's conquerors arrived in waves: Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantine Greeks again, Arab Aghlabids, Normans, Hohenstaufen Germans, Aragonese Spanish, and finally the Bourbon dynasty before Garibaldi's Risorgimento folded Sicily into the new Italian state. Each left a stratum. The dialect still carries all of them.
The Greek Foundation
Before Rome, Sicily was Magna Graecia — the great western extension of Greek civilization. Syracuse was one of the most powerful cities in the ancient world, rivaling Athens. The Greek presence on the island lasted centuries and left marks that standard Italian never absorbed.
Words like sdrubbuliari (to crumble), chianu (flat, from the Greek planos), and countless terms for fishing, farming, and the sea carry Greek roots that passed directly into the dialect without going through Rome's filter. Place names across the island — Agrigento, Selinunte, Siracusa — are Greek bones wearing later costumes. When a Sicilian nonna reaches for a word her Italian cousins do not recognize, she is often reaching back past Latin entirely.
The Arab Layer and What It Reveals
Between roughly 827 and 1072 CE, Arab forces from North Africa controlled most of Sicily. This was not a brief occupation — it was a civilization. Palermo became one of the wealthiest cities in the Mediterranean under Arab rule, its streets full of mosques, gardens, and scholars. The Arabic influence on the Sicilian dialect is so deep that it survives not just in vocabulary but in the rhythms of certain phrases.
The word zagara — the orange blossom, sacred in Sicilian wedding tradition — comes from Arabic. Giarra (a clay jar), tumminu (a unit of dry measure), scirocco (the hot southern wind that still scours the island every summer) — all Arabic. Even the Sicilian exclamation marranzanu, referring to the jaw harp, traces to Arab roots. These are not borrowed words in the way English borrows from French. They are native. They belong to the island now.
This is the world that 1099: Blood of the Lupa opens into — Sicily in the immediate aftermath of the Norman conquest of 1072, when the Arab-Norman synthesis was still forming and the island's identity was violently contested. The folk magic that Serafina Di Luna practices draws from this exact layered world.
The Norman Conquest and the Birth of a Hybrid Culture
The Normans who took Sicily from the Arabs in 1072 did something unusual for medieval conquerors: they absorbed what they found rather than erasing it. The Norman kings of Sicily held court in multiple languages — Arabic, Greek, and Latin simultaneously. Their royal robes were inscribed in Arabic script. Their palace chapel in Palermo, the Cappella Palatina, is a Byzantine-Norman-Arab architectural argument that somehow became a coherent whole.
The Sicilian dialect reflects this. Norman French gave the language words for feudal structures and governance — terms for lords, courts, and obligations. But the Normans did not displace the Arab vocabulary for daily life, agriculture, or the natural world. They layered on top of it. The result was a dialect that could discuss both a court judgment and the smell of jasmine at dusk in languages that had, until recently, been at war with each other.
It is worth noting that mongibello — the Sicilian name for Mount Etna, which figures centrally in the Di Luna bloodline's origin — is itself a hybrid: Latin mons (mountain) fused with Arabic jabal (also mountain). The island named its volcano twice, in two conquered tongues, as if once were not enough to contain it. You can read more about the mythology of Mongibello and the Lupa in the posts gathered at the Luna Strega blog.
Spanish Rule and the Silence It Left
Aragonese and Spanish rule over Sicily lasted from 1282 through the eighteenth century — longer than any other foreign dominion. And yet the Spanish layer in the dialect is, in some ways, the quietest. Not absent: words like azzizzari (to dress up smartly) and certain verb constructions trace to Castilian. But the Spanish era is also remembered in Sicily as the era of the Inquisition, of rigid social stratification, of a peasant population kept deliberately illiterate.
When you suppress a people's reading and writing for centuries, you do not erase their language — you drive it underground, into the spoken word, the proverb, the charm murmured over a sick child. The stregoneria tradition that runs through the Di Luna saga survived Spanish Catholic suppression precisely because it lived in whispered Sicilian, not in documents that could be seized and burned.
What the Dialect Preserves That History Books Do Not
Academic history records who won. Dialect records who stayed. The Greek fishermen, the Arab farmers, the Norman stewards, the Spanish landowners — they all eventually left or were absorbed. The people who remained, generation after generation, carried the words of every ruler in their mouths and passed them to their children without ever writing them down.
This is why Sicilian dialect is so resistant to standardization, and why Italian unification never fully absorbed it. The dialect is not stubbornness for its own sake. It is memory. It carries the record of every hand that held Sicily, every god that was worshipped on its soil, every magic system that took root in its volcanic earth. When a Di Luna woman in the novel pronounces a protective formula over her threshold, she is drawing on a linguistic and spiritual inheritance that no single conqueror ever fully owned.
Explore the world of the Di Luna bloodline and the stregoneria rooted in this history at lunastrega.com, or find the books and ritual objects inspired by the series at the Luna Strega store.
The Sicilian dialect is a living archive. Every word that survived three thousand years of conquest carries the weight of the people who refused to let it die. That refusal — quiet, stubborn, generational — is the same force that moves through the Di Luna women across a thousand years of the trilogy. It begins in Norman Sicily, in blood and fire and a pact made at the foot of Mongibello. Read where it starts: 1099: Blood of the Lupa on Amazon.