Sicilian

The Sicilians are the people of Sicily and the adjoining coast of southern Calabria. Sicily was held by native peoples and then Greek and Carthaginian settlers before it became Rome's grain province. Arab emirs ruled from the ninth to the eleventh century, until the Norman Hauteville conquest of 1061–1091; Roger II, crowned king in 1130, ruled a multilingual Palermo.

The Norman kings planted Lombard colonies inland, whose Gallo-Italic speech survived. Under Emperor Frederick II, the Sicilian School made the vernacular the first literary language of the Italo-Romance world. Angevin rule after 1266 ended in the Sicilian Vespers revolt of 1282 and the coming of the Crown of Aragon; Sicilian served the island's parliament while Catalan served the court.

Spanish viceregal rule began in 1479; after the plague of 1656 and earthquake of 1693 Sicily was rebuilt in Sicilian Baroque. After short spells under Savoy and Austria, the Bourbons took Sicily in 1735 and merged it with Naples into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1816.