Abstract

Sicilian songwriting overflows with multilingual incursions and experimentations, both in dialect and in foreign languages. The aim of this paper is to analyze the choices of four representative authors with different biographical and artistic backgrounds who share a strong propensity to multilingualism. Two of them (Carlo Muratori and Fratelli Mancuso) write mainly in Sicilian and use Italian in "marked" contexts as a language of emancipation if compared with the niche code. On the contrary, Franco Battiato e Pippo Pollina write mainly in Italian. For them Sicilian represents the language used to express childhood affections and feelings. Different dynamics are at the basis of the use of foreign languages. These stem from personal experiences or ideologies associated with the languages in question to music needs.