The Sounds of the Girgenti Dialect, and Their Development

The Sounds of the Girgenti Dialect and Their Development is the first English translation of the dissertation submitted by Luigi Pirandello to the University of Bonn in partial fulfillment for a doctorate in Romance philology in 1891. The work presents a detailed account of the phonetics of Girgentine, the author's native Sicilian dialect. In it the young author corrects and supplements much of the philological work of his predecessors. This linguistic study should be of great interest to Pirandello scholars and students especially because of its relevance to the author's ideas on dialectology, and the many important but neglected works he produced in Sicilian.