Camilleri felt a sort of unfamiliarity with Italian, and this is why he did not use it in an exclusive way for the kind of novel and narrative style he had in mind (Matt, 2020). After all, his family, which belonged to the old Sicilian middle-class, communicated in a blend of Italian and dialectal elements, as many Italian families used to do and still do (Matt, 2020). Many words, metaphors or idioms are those heard at home when he was a child and from people from different parts of Sicily and thus having a different pronunciation. In many interviews, in fact, Camilleri explained that this language came from his childhood and, through the novels, he tried to reproduce it. He tried to make his “mother tongue” live again in order to recall the past (Cerrato, 2018). Moreover, the use of this mixed language is a way of avoiding a flat and anonymous Italian and of conveying more expressiveness (Caprara and Plaza González, 2016), which is achieved through a process of functionalisation of his language, which adjusted to the literary world he was building. As Camilleri himself admitted, the invented words we find in his books are the result of his creativity and imagination, and inherited from his grandmother Elvira. Very often she used to address him with words that she had completely made up to play with her grandson, who had to guess their meanings (Sanna, 2019).

As Cadeddu (2017) points out, Camilleri’s language is also characterised by the use of different registers. Camilleri’s multilingualism is made up not only of diatopic and diastratic variations, but also of diaphasic variation. While reading, in fact, we can notice that the writer makes use of all those register variations, ranging from the colloquial one to the bureaucratic one. Yet Caprara and Plaza González (2016) admit that sometimes it is difficult to understand whether the writer makes use of a register or of a diatopic and diastratic variety. According to Cerrato (2018), Camilleri moves within the linguistic continuum both of the standard language and of the dialect and makes use of every variety within them as he pleases. Vizmuller-Zocco (2001) observes that Camilleri’s linguistic mixture has three functions: the first one is humorous, the second is casual, and the last one is definitive. The particular language used by the writer clearly creates a comic and humorous effect; he achieves this effect by scattering Sicilian terms or invented words without any reasonable criterion. As for the last function, the vigatese defines the characters and helps to separate “i concetti dai sentimenti”4. Italian is the language of “concepts” of reality, while dialect is the language of “feelings and emotions”; so when Camilleri uses exclusively Italian, he is referring to the concepts, while when he uses dialect, feelings and emotions are usually at play.