Language
Santa Cristina Gela is bilingual, its inhabitants proficient in Arbërisht and Italian but they also well understand Sicilian. However, the local dialect of Arbërisht is undergoing attrition with children learning Arbërisht as their first language and being more confident using Arbërisht, then by school leaving age are more comfortable with Italian and are able to express a wider range of concepts in Italian. This is furthered by the lack of media or schooling in Arberisht.
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Famous quotes containing the word language:
“The reader uses his eyes as well as or instead of his ears and is in every way encouraged to take a more abstract view of the language he sees. The written or printed sentence lends itself to structural analysis as the spoken does not because the reader’s eye can play back and forth over the words, giving him time to divide the sentence into visually appreciated parts and to reflect on the grammatical function.”
—J. David Bolter (b. 1951)
“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)