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- Title
The Functions of Sicilian in Camilleri's Il ladro di merendine.
- Authors
RUSSI, CINZIA
- Abstract
Italian author, director and media personality Andrea Camilleri has attained extraordinary fame over the past forty years becoming a cultural phenomenon in Italy. He is perhaps best known for his novels, particularly the Commissario Montalbano mystery series, the television adaptation of which has achieved the highest audience rating for prime time dramas. Decisive to Camilleri's success is his language, which is distinguished by a unique blend of features from different varieties of Italian and, primarily, Sicilian dialect. This paper investigates the incidence of Sicilian dialect and its situational use as a function of topics, characters, and settings in Il ladro di merendine, the third novel (1996) and the first television episode (1999) of the Montalbano series. A contrastive analysis of the distribution of dialectal features in the novel and the episode is carried out aiming at establishing if they play a defining role in the depiction of characters, plot and main themes, and to evaluate if differences in such functionality exist between the two media. My results show that in the television episode Sicilian features more notably (especially at the phonological level), indexes high emotional, most typically negative involvement and (stereo) typical traits of (Sicilian/Southern Italian) women but can also convey humor and affective connotations.
- Subjects
ALBANO Mountain (Tuscany, Italy); SICILIAN literature; CAMILLERI, Andrea, 1925-2019; SOCIOLINGUISTICS; TELEVISION adaptations
- Publication
Italica, 2018, Vol 95, Issue 2, p183
- ISSN
0021-3020
- Publication type
Article