The Gallo-Italic of Sicily (Italian: Gallo-italico di Sicilia) is a group of Gallo-Italic dialects, linguistic set of Romance languages, found in central-eastern Sicily that date back to migrations from Northern Italy during the time of Norman Roger I of Sicily and which continued after his death under his successor Roger II (from around 1080 to 1120).
The towns that were populated by the new immigrants were to become known as the "Lombard communities" (or cumuna lummardi in the Sicilian language). In truth, the colonisers, known as "Lombards of Sicily" were not all from Lombardy, but most parts of Northern Italy, including Piedmont, Liguria and Emilia. Apart from their geographic origin, the one common attribute that the colonisers had was that they brought with them their Gallo-Italic idioms. These idioms were to add to the Gallic influence of the newly developing Sicilian language (influences which also include Norman and Old Provençal), but more importantly, in about nine isolated communities, the idioms would merge with Sicilian over the centuries to create distinctive Gallo-Sicilian dialects. They are far too unique to be considered dialects of Sicilian itself, nor can they be considered dialects of the Lombard language, and because of the differences in origin of each respective community, they share only a passing resemblance with each other.
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Although Roger I took 30 years to take complete control of Sicily (1061 to 1091), by 1080 he had effective control over much of the island. In the course of this conquest, large parts of central Sicily became depopulated as the Saracens of the muslim faith either fled to other Arabic communities that remained intact, or else fled the island entirely in the direction of North Africa. Roger encouraged new migrations to these central parts, in particular, the migrations of Latins who were closely aligned with the Western church. The bulk of the migrations came from Northern Italy. The latter migrations were to provide the vulgar Latin which would form the basis of the new Romance language, while the former migrations would both influence the development of the language profoundly, while at the same time, create altogether unique Gallo-Italic of Sicily idioms in some of the more isolated communities.
The main Gallo-italic dialects of Sicily are found in the following towns:
Other such communities existed also in the provinces of Catania (for example, in Paternò, Bronte and Randazzo), Syracuse (Ferla, Buccheri, Cassaro) and Palermo (Corleone).
Similar communities have survived in part outside of Sicily, in Basilicata, which was subject to similar forces during the same period in question; the particular lucano dialects spoken by those communities are known as "Dialetti gallo-italici di Basilicata".
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