He has been credited with more than 50 plays written in the Sicilian dialect; titles of 35 of his works survive, but the remains are scanty.
While coastal erosion is hardly the stuff of the traditional ballad – a narrative-form Morrison rendered so effectively in the Yorkshire-dialect title-poem of The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper, his 1987 collection – Shingle Street's geological nemesis unfolds excitingly.
Hirda was inspired by the stories of the Shetland Islands, and the libretto makes much use of Shetland dialect: the title itself means chaos or confusion.
A Neapolitan courtier and poet named Giambattista Basile gathered the tales, in a Neapolitan dialect, under the memorable title of "Lo Cunto de li Cunti".
Winterson's, The Daylight Gate, takes its title from the dialect term for dusk: it's when night-time horror begins, and that's appropriate given Winterson's publishers, Hammer, which in partnership with Arrow Books is tapping the genre made famous by its film studio.
Because music is one of the book's themes, Angelou uses abbreviated verb endings in her title that reflect Black dialect and evoke the sound of a blues singer.
Suggested titles are Kes (Yorkshire dialect), Snatch (all manner of London varieties), Twin Town (Welsh dialect), Anita and Me (West Midland dialect), Trainspotting (Edinburgh dialect), and Hot Fuzz (West Country dialect).
It looked up the album (correctly) but then rendered the song titles in some crazy-quilt dialect, complete with misspellings, grammatical errors, and overpunctutation.
The mysteries are sustained in Gauguin's titles, those fragments of Tahitian dialect that materialise on the canvas like overheard speech one can never understand; those ambiguous questions (mortal or rhetorical?): what are we?
"The title, and some of the local dialect, may require a bit of translation, but the film's warm-and-fuzzy amalgam of multiculturalism and feminism will look very familiar indeed," A. O. Scott wrote in The Times.
