Firstly, allow me to say how happy I was to stumble across your site. I recently had an urge to get back into reading and writing in Sicilian, but struggled to find a good forum.... and then I found this site. It's a worthy goal, to standardize written Sicilian, but the history of such attempts is a long one and none have ever managed to get past first base. Still, I think it's worthwhile and offer you my full support and encouragement. Further to the above, only the other day I stumbled across another site which has been working on standardizing the written form of Sicilian for nearly 20 years, led by a certain prof. Filippo Maria Provitina. They call themselves: Kademia du Krivu (http://linguasiciliana.com/kademia-du-krivu/). AS you can see from how they spell Kademia, their preferred written form veers substantially from what most writers of Sicilian would view as the norm. How far did they get? Did they convince anyone to follow their standard? I don't know. There's hardly anything about them on the web. Anyway, I only refer to them because they are just another example of a local body (or single professor) who have dedicated many years to standardizing Sicilian, seemingly in vain. My last point, the very, very best thing that can be done to disseminate a worthy form of Standard Sicilian is to have a forum where many dabble in written Sicilian on a daily basis. Over and above the many worthy projects mentioned on this board, the number one priority should be just getting as many people as possible communicating in written Sicilian on a daily basis, about every conceivable subject, doesn't matter what it is, just doing it is what matters most. Cchiù prestu ca putemu fari propriu d’accussi, cchiù megghiu ca fussi. Salutamu!
Welcome to the forum! You may also find that we're much more active in the Facebook group, but this is a great place to store information, and discussions. I think you'll be happy to hear that we've developed an orthography that is in its late stages of being approved. We've currently created a large amount of academic support from dozens of professors, and sicilian activists. We are currently preparing to convert the Italian "full version" into an abridged English language version for peer-review. We've also identified a list of journals interested in such content, and have a few experts in Italic regional languages which have volunteered to act as reviewers. Although, as with any orthography, trade-offs had to be made, we hope this consensus driven yet very flexible orthography can help resolve some of these issues. It's been a problem for far too long for our community, and it will be a relief to see it behind us. Please let us know if you're looking to get involved more in our mission. You'll find me on Facebook or you can message me here.
Hi Paul, thanks for the response. I'll check out the Facebook page. I have quite a large personal library of Sicilian texts, dictionaries, grammars, theatrical works and poetry, so very happy to be involved in any way that I can. I look forward to seeing the final document. I'm pretty flexible myself about such things, and can adapt to pretty much anything (I would think I've seen it all). Salutamu!
