The Strange Case of the Gallo-Italic Dialects of Sicily: Preservation and Innovation in Contact-Induced Change

The Gallo-Italic dialects widespread within central–eastern Sicily represent the result of medieval immigration settlers from southern Piedmont and Liguria, after Norman conquest island (1061–1091). As far as language spoken by these communities is concerned, an oddity arises: most their lexical syntactic features developed further through contact with neighboring varieties (such as, notably, Sicilian), whereas, at a phonetic/phonological level, they have remained very conservative, largely maintaining original northern characteristics. In present paper, possible causes underlying such split are discussed: if transfer structures can be triggered presence bilingual speakers who become progressively dominant (that is, more proficient) in Sicilian L2, preservation main tool employed to ends emphasizing identity new both ethnic linguistic perspective.