“See, Your Grandma Has Two Mother Tongues…or Only One?”: Shame, Dialect, and Shifting Mother Tongues in Sicily

Abstract

In the Sicilian town of Palermo, two main languages are spoken, Italian and Sicilian. But people are often unwilling to consider Sicilian a language, taking it instead as an inferior “dialect.” Linguistic choice is associated with two broad, competing discourses about Sicilian culture and ethnicity: discourses of heritage on the one hand and discourses of backwardness on the other. This essay examines how linguistic practices using these two languages evoke generalized affects that derive from a history of colonization of Sicily; a racialization of Sicilian ethnicity; and a subsequent association of the place and people with low education, poverty, and criminality. Through autoethnography and fieldwork encounters, I discuss how people use, refuse, avoid, or reclaim Sicilian in everyday contexts and track how discourses of the ‘lingua madre’ (mother tongue) are differently negotiated across these practices. I suggest that these negotiations are acts of commensuration through which people navigate emotions of pride and shame and locate themselves within their social worlds.