Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Foreign Languages

Reader 1

Marino Forlino

Reader 2

Sabrina Ovan

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Abstract

This thesis examines the representation of the Sicilian dialect in contemporary Italian mafia cinema. In order to provide a background on language use in Italy, Chapter 1 introduces a history of Italy and Italian language alongside a specific focus on Sicily and Sicilian dialect. Chapter 2 provides a chronological timeline of Italian cinema, with a specific focus on popular cinematic trends and the use of standard Italian and dialect within Italian film. Chapter 3 provides three case studies of Sicilian dialect use in contemporary Italian mafia movies: I cento passi (2000), La mafia uccide solo d’estate (2013), and Iddu (2024). Using a sociolinguistic framework rooted in studies of diglossia, dilalia, and language ideology, this thesis analyzes how each film constructs, stigmatizes, or revalorizes the dialect within narratives of family, politics, and organized crime. The project demonstrates that Sicilian continues to function as a language of intimacy, emotion, and local identity, while Italian remains the code of institutional authority and national narration. Yet, the films diverge in their treatment and portrayal of Sicilian dialect: I cento passi presents Sicilian as an affective but subordinated code; La mafia uccide solo d’estate employs it as a moralized and caricatured marker of ignorance; and Iddu offers a more complex, autonomous, and multifaceted use of the dialect, including subtitled sequences and interior monologues. Finally, the thesis situates these cinematic representations within the broader sociolinguistic context of contemporary Sicily, marked by declining intergenerational transmission but renewed symbolic vitality. While cinema cannot reverse the sociolinguistic regression of the dialect, it plays a significant role in shaping public perceptions and cultural significance. The three films reveal how Sicilian survives not only as a form of communication, but as a symbolic voice — a space where the island negotiates its identity between stigma, creativity, and cultural resilience.

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