Seen that Camilleri in Hungary has more than one translator, it might be worth our while to compare the different translations, and how the translators chose to translate moments of linguistic interest. Vizmuller-Zocco (Vizmuller-Zocco, 1999) identified three contexts of the Sicilian dialect: (1) speech of the lower social class characters and mafiosi, (2) proverbs and magic spells, and (3) synonyms. As assessed rightly in Russi (Russi, 2018), though, she seems to have only considered Il cane di terracotta, and no other works were referenced. Santulli also thinks that Sicilian is linked to the mafia and lower-class characters, while Italian is the language of the law, of the government, which is “distant and detached from the local and everyday reality” (Santulli, 2010 cited in Russi, 2018: 202).

In a later study, Vizmuller-Zocco addressed the question of language again and considered it to be one of the six tests of (un)popularity. She also affirmed that dialects carry different functions which can typically be found in all literary texts that make use of these varieties. The three functions are “ludica” (playful), “casuale” (incidental), “definitoria” (definitive). In the first one, the linguistic form is not linked to the plot and only serves the linguistic play; in the second, it is the case of a grammatically correct Italian that Camilleri wants to “flavour” with the Sicilian vocabulary; in the third, the language serves to identify the location (Sicily), a person (e.g. from different regions of Italy), or to “divide concepts from sentiments” (Vizmuller-Zocco, 2001: 42), because the dialect is able to express emotions and feelings that the standard language cannot. In the following, I would like to examine the use of these functions in the two aforementioned novels.

La forma dell’acqua, linguistically, contains much fewer dialectical characteristics than the other novel in consideration, the language used most of the time resembles the Italian neostandard. However, Camilleri consistently uses some words that lead us to the typical Sicilian language and show his intention of adapting his own narrational voice that is different from other writers. These words include magari [maybe] in the sense of anche [also], nèsciri [exit, walk out], trasìri [enter], tanticchia [a bit] and others. Russi, in her analysis of Il ladro di merendine, the third novel of the Montalbano series, distinguished three groups of the lexicon used by Camilleri: (1) authentic Sicilian items, (2) Sicilian items recognizable to non-Sicilian readers, and (3) “a ‘core’ Sicilian lexicon comprised of items that, basically, have acquired a fixed status in Camilleri’s work” (Russi, 2018: 191). In a later work (Russi, 2020), she analysed in great detail the linguistic features of La forma dell’acqua. Of this analysis emerges that some features are almost exclusively present in the characters’ speech, that some later characteristic features are not present at all in this novel, and that “in general the characters’ language exhibits a larger, more varied array and a denser distribution of structural features, with frequent co-occurrences of both phonetic/phonological and morphological/morphosyntactic features, than the diegetic voice” (Russi, 2020: 67–68).

All of the aforementioned groups are also present in the novels analysed in this paper; however, the base narration and the enunciations in standard Italian are translated into standard Hungarian language. On the other hand, there are some key moments in the novels in which the use of language, especially of the dialect(s), becomes of significance, and which the translators (should have) translated accordingly in a marked, differentiated way from the standard narrational language.

Just by looking at the first pages of the original Italian text of Il cane di terracotta it really stands out how Camilleri’s use of language has changed: the Sicilian or Sicilianized words are not sporadic anymore, they are now a continuous part of his own narrational voice. As confirmed by Pagano, “the language choices were not static because, just like the author with his novels, the director of the series decided to gradually, and more often, insert dialectisms that are typical and identifying” (Pagano, 2021:193). Luigi Matt wrote the same concerning Camilleri’s use of dialect: