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Languages

Today, in Sicily, most people are bilingual and speak both Italian and Sicilian, a Romance language distinct from Italian. Some Sicilian words are loanwords from Greek, Catalan, Norman, French, Arabic, Spanish and other languages. Varieties related to Sicilian are also spoken in Calabria and Salento. Nowadays, the use of Sicilian is limited to informal contexts (mostly in family) and in a majority of cases it is replaced by the so-called regional Italian of Sicily, a variety of Italian that is influenced by Sicilian. Sicilian had a significant influence on the Maltese language.

Sicilian was an early influence in the development of the first Italian standard, although its use remained confined to an intellectual elite. This was a literary language in Sicily created under the auspices of Frederick II and his court of notaries, or Magna Curia, which, headed by Giacomo da Lentini, also gave birth to the Sicilian School, widely inspired by troubadour literature. Its linguistic and poetic heritage was later assimilated into the literary Florentine dialect use by Dante Alighieri, the father of modern Italian. Dante, in his De vulgari eloquentia, claims that "In effect, this vernacular seems to deserve higher praise than the others since all the poetry written by Italians can be called Sicilian". It is in this language that appeared the first sonnet, whose invention is attributed to Giacomo da Lentini himself.

Other languages are spoken in Sicily. Within the province of Palermo, four towns are home to speakers of Arbërësh varieties. Arbërësh is the name given to varieties of Albanian spoken in Italy. In the eastern part of the island, there are Gallo-Italic varieties known as Gallo-Italic of Sicily, which are related to the other Gallo-Italic languages spoken in most of northern Italy and in other isolated pockets of southern Italy.