The Sicilian Language (continued)

The red pie segment represents the proportion of time from 6000 BC that the Sicilian language may have been spoken in its original form, before the arrival of the Phoenicians around 1000 BC and the colonization of Sicily by the Greeks starting in 734 BC. Continuing clockwise, each segment represents the total number of years that that country or peoples dominated Sicily and possibly directly influenced its language. Indirect influence may have lasted longer. For example, we know that Greek continued to be the official church language long after Byzantium lost political control of the island. Click on any of the colored boxes or lines of text in the legend on the right for more detail. This link to Empires in the Middle East provides a broad brush regional view during some of the same time.