Tu ca nun chiagne lyrics

I think the differences between Sicilian and Neapolitan are quite small, but I definitely found these lyrics in a book of Sicilian songs, and teh book definitely said that the language was Sicilian.

There is a tendency to call just about every language spoken in the South of Italy "Neapolitan" despite its being generally recognised that there are several distinct languages . And of course there is a tendency to claim that all these languages are actually dialects of the Italian language rather than separate languages, despite their descent from a different dialect of vulgar Latin from the one that led to the Italian language - and that claim is based on pretty much the same sort of argument as is the claim that all the southern languages are Neapolitan.

But when I look at the text carefully, I see there are things like "Cchiù calma" instead of "Cchiù ccalma" and "e tutto" instead of "e ttuto" which seem to indicate that the language is neither Neapolitan nor Sicilian, since both those languages double initial consonants after "cchiù" and after "e" (and after a lot of other things, probably more things in Sicilian than in Neapolitan).

So now I'm beginning to wonder what language it really is!

I've changed the lanuage to Neapolitan because the Italian wikipedia article says the lyrics were written by Bovio, which is enough for me. The dratted book I got the lyrics from didn't name authors of lyrics (or indeed composers of music) for any of the songs in it.

I don't think the article about de Curtis is useful for language, as he had nothing to do with the lyrics, just the music.

I'm not actually enough of a fool to think Tagliavini's pronunciation is going to be accurate enough to distinguish "ccalma" from "calma" or "ttuto" from "tuto". Pronunciation is a general problem for Northern Italians (not just Emilians) singing Southern Italian songs. The missing geminate consonants were missing in the book I had the words from, and as I said that shouldn't happen either in Neapolitan nor in Sicilian. But looking at some more chunks of Neapolitan text I see that it does happen quite often, and guess that that's probably because there's almost always no need to indicate it in writing so people sometimes don't bother.