The whole book is written in Sicilian. As a textbook, it contains the rules of grammar and exercises that help students review as well as to expand their knowledge. In this new volume, Prof. Cipolla touched on subjects not explored in the first volume, he treated historical aspects of the language and presented interesting linguistic peculiarities that can be heard in some towns.

The extraordinary feature of this volume is its treatment of the different dialects one can hear on Sicily. This is the first text that explains how the diatopic variations function in Sicily. The book does not teach you how to speak as they do in Messina or Catania. If you want to learn Messinese or Catanese, this book will help you, but the objective is more fundamental: to provide students with the means to identify the various parrati and to understand that Sicilian is still one language. In fact the differences one hears exist primarily in the spoken language, not the written language. From this point, students learn to identify the differences that they hear in the spoken language.

Another important feature of Learn Sicilian II is its study of how Sicilian words are formed. Learning how to use prefixes, suffixes and recognizing how English word endings correspond with Sicilian endings helps students to add hundreds of words to their vocabulary. They can apply these rules to understand words that they have never seen before. From the study of prefixes, suffixes and ending a surprising fact emerges: that there is a remarkable similarity between Sicilian and English that’s based on their common derivation from Latin (50% of English words are derived from Latin). And the text illustrates this derivation with many examples.

With the publication of the second volume, university students have at their disposal the equivalent of two years of study. And with the second volume students can now major or minor in Sicilian Studies by combining such a two-year sequence with other courses in Sicilian culture, literature and history.

Click here to purchase a copy of the printed book from Legas online store. Or click here to purchase the electronic version.