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Catalunya is a good yardstick for Sicily. Whatever Catalunya manages to gain for itself in terms of autonomy within the context of modern Spain, Sicily should always look to match it in the context...

Is it odd that Romania would be almost triple Southern Europe compared to Bulgaria?

Cefalù deserves a bit of a mention:
...

I just had a shudder at the thought of macaroni cheese. When my kids were young, they loved this horrible gunk you could get in the supermarket dirt cheap, it stunk to high heaven and this horrible...

Did someone mention the Italian bureaucracy?

OMG, you never, ever want to have anything to do with the Italian bureaucracy.

Does anyone know what TR stands for?

Funny you should mention the level of service. My brother-in-law has lived in the US (Boston) for 25 years. He visits Australia once every few years to see family etc. He will often mention...

Aussies often have a thing about the French, but then again, many aussie tourists are often drunk and obnoxious themselves - little wonder people might act the same back to them.

Personally, I...

I'm certainly not viewing walloons as invaders, nor am I suggesting that the Flemish have not fought back, but they would have fought back because the taalgrens had been moving northwards for over...

Andrea Camilleri is a very popular crime writer, as we all know, who hails from Sicily. He is known to add the odd sprinkling of Sicilian into his writing, but I do stress, it is just an odd...

Has anyone ever heard of the Kademia du Krivu? http://linguasiciliana.com/kademia-du-krivu/

I stumbled across it the other day. It appears to be yet another attempt to standardise the...

That's a pretty good explanation as to why it has evolved the way it has.

curiouscat makes a fair point, afterall, it is the Eurasian continent, and it's pretty arbitrary the delineation between Europe and Asia.

And let's not forget that Azerbaijan and even Australia...

I think we would all accept that there has been a major move to protect and strengthen Dutch in the Dutch speaking parts of Belgium, arguably out of necessity because of the Northwards movement of...

Well, the taalgrens used to go through the extreme North-West of France, well into the 20th century.

Are there many Dutch speakers left in North-West France? I don't know, but if not, or if there...

In this respect, your people are amongst the most multi-lingual in all of Europe. in the context of Belgie, the Flemish are far more likely to be able to speak French than the Walloons are able to...

That certainly makes sense, and also is consistent with just how far North the taalgraans is in that region, which continues to creep North even today - in other words, the Walloons may have been one...

Yeh, I noticed the same for a couple of days around that time.

Hi Kirsten, my situation is different because I naturally get a lot of near East and Levantine readings, but mine is an interesting story nevertheless. About a year ago I did my Ancestry DNA, and...

Thanks for sharing, that's surprising to me because I had imagined it was a Southern thing (favouring the simple past tense construction), but I had no real basis for knowing one way or the other.
...

Got this off the it wiki, it's a break down of all the entries in Giarrizzo's Dizionario Etimologico Siciliano.

While this appears to suggest that about half of the entries have a derivation that...

An interesting thought.

As a general rule, in this part of the world, in modern times, you do not see Germanising of romance language speakers, usually the reverse. Let us not forget that low...

That makes sense, and I guess the glottal stop doesn't help matters.

Slightly different comparison, I am always struck by how the Maltese accent (speaking English), is very similar to many Arab speaking countries. Yes, I understand that makes some sense on one level,...

So aujourd'hui ends up meaning something like: on the day which happens to be this very day.

At least it leaves people in absolutely no doubt that we are talking about today, as in this very...