Gallo-Italic

These Gallo-Italic communities are descendants of northern Italian settlers planted in the south by the Norman kings of Sicily. During the conquest of 1061 to 1091 parts of central Sicily were depopulated, and Count Roger I and his successors invited colonists from the Aleramici lands of southern Montferrat; medieval usage called such northerners Lombards, and their towns were named the oppida Lombardorum.

The migrants kept their Gallo-Italic, Lombard-type speech as language islands in towns such as Nicosia and Piazza Armerina, and their idiom fed Gallic and Occitan features into the forming Sicilian language.

Kindred colonies founded under the same Norman policy survived on the mainland around Potenza in Basilicata and around Trecchina and Rivello on the Tyrrhenian coast. Cut off from the dialects of the Po valley, these enclaves maintained their northern vernaculars through centuries of Aragonese and Spanish rule.