La Sicilia dialettale

[Dennis R. Preston]

Colleagues,

I am a little puzzled by these references to how grandmother did (or
did not) pronounce certain words if she came from Sicily. Although
there are important internal dialects in Sicily (there is no such
thing as a "Sicilian dialect"), there are certain traits in most
Sicilian dialects (shared with Calabria and Salento) which might shed
some light on the discussion here.

Most importantly, the 5 vowel system which has developed in these
three areas is as follows:

Long and short /i/ and long /e/ are realized as /i/
Short /e/ is realized as /e/
Long and short /a/ are realized as /a/
Short /o/ is realized as /o/
Long /o/ and long and short /u/ are realized as /u/

Next, however, and also important to the discussion  which has gone
on so far, we find that in Sicilian dialects (and not in Calabria and
Salento), that this 5 vowel system is reduced to three (/i/, /a/,
/u/) in final position (which helps us understand why BOTH historical
long and short /o/ become /u/).

Of course, these Sicilian dialect facts are not automatic predictors
of how Sicilian dialects in America influenced the pronunciation  of
Sicilian-American forms, but they are surely the right jumping-off
place for such discussions since they come from well-known
information about Italian dialects.

A little reading around in the available scholarly record would be welcome.

dInIs (not really a romance dialectologist)