There are journeys we make with our feet — and others we make with our tongue. This one began, oddly enough, in a Spanish class in Barcelona, where I, a wandering Sicilian trying to tame verbs and accents, kept coming across familiar sounds. Words that felt like cousins who had emigrated years ago and suddenly knocked on my classroom door.
Oftentimes, when Vania — a warm, smiling teacher — introduced a new Spanish word, a small breeze rose in the back of my mind, like an old friend whispering: “But wait… we say this too in Sicilian” One day, my classmate Chiabi, a bright Hungarian with the curiosity of a linguist, turned to me and asked: “Is Sicilian actually a language?”
