ABSTRACT
Identifying the margins of the Arabic-speaking communities is made complicated by the type and amount of evidence to hand. The most obvious working assumption seeks to identify areas of Muslim settlement with the areas of Arabic speakers. As a general principle, this is useful for defining the main distributions and contrasts and, indeed, guides us to the clearest linguistic division on the island between the towns that had seen increasing ‘Latin’ immigration in the east compared to the Muslim-dominated areas of the south-west. Yet this general assessment cannot take account of those who may have known more than one language or the many degrees of local variation, which in Sicily could be considerable. As such, the available evidence only allows us to present a somewhat disjointed picture. For example, although the inland areas of Sicily were probably more densely populated in the twelfth century than at any time from the classical period to the 1860s, the most important towns in Sicily were, and have always been, coastal.1 However, most available information about social composition from the Norman period relates to rural inland estates and small towns that were conceded to landlords from the de Hautevilles’ possessions and later from the crown demesne. Under other circumstances, we might have expected such isolated rural communities to have been relatively unaffected by wider political events beyond their control. Left to their own devices, villagers might well have continued to lead traditional, conservative lifestyles on such estates. If this were the case, then giving a good general account of the linguistic composition of rural Sicilian villeinage would have been a lot simpler. As it is, some of these communities had been severely disrupted by conflict, or contained villeins who had, or had been, resettled from other parts of the island or even from abroad.
