La Salle Explorers

[eCat]

kind of an interesting read ( a bit long to get to the point though)

New Jersey people who can't speak Italian - refer to an Italian language that is dead because most of the immigrants that came here and created little Italy neighborhoods arrived before Italy's unification.


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The basic story is this: Italy is a very young country made up of many very old kingdoms awkwardly stapled together to make a patchwork whole. Before 1861, these different kingdoms—Sardinia, Rome, Tuscany, Venice, Sicily (they were called different things at the time, but roughly correspond to those regions now)—those were, basically, different countries. Its citizens didn’t speak the same language, didn’t identify as countrymen, sometimes were even at war with each other. The country was unified over the period from around 1861 until World War I, and during that period, the wealthier northern parts of the newly-constructed Italy imposed unfair taxes and, basically, annexed the poorer southern parts. As a result, southern Italians, ranging from just south of Rome all the way down to Sicily, fled in huge numbers to other countries, including the U.S.

About 80 percent of Italian-Americans are of southern Italian descent, says Fred Gardaphe, a professor of Italian-American studies at Queens College. “Ships from Palermo went to New Orleans and the ships from Genoa and Naples went to New York,” he says. They spread from there, but the richest pockets of Italian-Americans aren’t far from New York City. They’re clustered in New York City, Long Island, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and in and around Philadelphia.

Yet those Italians, all from southern Italy and all recent immigrants in close proximity to each other in the US, wouldn’t necessarily consider themselves countrymen. That’s because each of the old Italian kingdoms had their own...well, D’Imperio, who is Italian, calls them “dialects.” But others refer to them in different ways. Basically the old Italian kingdoms each spoke their own languages that largely came from the same family tree, slightly but not all that much closer than the Romance languages, like French, Spanish, or Portuguese. The general family name for these languages is Italo-Dalmatian (Dalmatian, it turns out, refers to Croatia. The dog is from there, too.). They were not all mutually comprehensible, and had their own external influences. Calabrian, for example, is heavily influenced by Greek, thanks to a long Greek occupation and interchange. In the northwest near the border with France, Piedmont, with its capital of Turin, spoke a language called Piedmontese, which is sort of French-ish. Sicilian, very close to North Africa, had a lot of Arabic-type stuff in it. I use the past tense for these because these languages are dying, quickly. “Dialects do still exist, but they're spoken mainly by old people,” says D’Imperio. (Sicilian put up more of a fight than most.)

During unification, the northern Italian powers decided that having a country that speaks about a dozen different languages would pose a bit of a challenge to their efforts, so they picked one and called it “Standard Italian” and made everyone learn it. The one that they picked was Tuscan, and they probably picked it because it was the language of Dante, the most famous Italian writer. (You can see why calling these languages “dialects” is tricky; Standard Italian is just one more dialect, not the base language which Calabrian or Piedmontese riffs on, which is kind of the implication.)

Standard Italian has variations, like any other language, which we’ll call accents. Someone from Sicily would have a Sicilian accent, but when speaking Standard Italian, a person from Milan will, hopefully, be able to understand them, because at a basic level, they’ll be using a language with the same structure and a vocabulary that is mostly identical.

But this gets weird, because most Italian-Americans can trace their immigrant ancestors back to that time between 1861 and World War I, when the vast majority of “Italians,” such as Italy even existed at the time, wouldn’t have spoken the same language at all, and hardly any of them would be speaking the northern Italian dialect that would eventually become Standard Italian.

calling Capicola "Gabagool" or Mozarrella "Mutzadell", they are actually referencing an regional dialect of Italian that isn't spoken anymore.

“I grew up speaking English and Italian dialects from my family's region of Puglia,” says Gardaphe. “And when I went to Italy, very few people could understand me, even the people in my parents' region. They recognized that I was speaking as if I was a 70-year-old man, when I was only 26 years old.” Italian-American Italian is not at all like Standard Italian; instead it’s a construction of the frozen shards left over from languages that don’t even really exist in Italy anymore with minimal intervention from modern Italian.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ho ... -explained

[Bklyn]

That's really interesting and funny, actually.

[AlabamAlum]

You see that in America, on a smalled scale, with the Cajuns. When the Acadians were forced out of Canada in the 1750's and settled in the swamps of south Louisiana, their French was already not exactly the same as the people in Quebec. Over the last 250 years it has become even more different. Spellings, idioms, conjugation, etc, etc, are different.

Someone visiting Thibideaux from Paris or even Montreal has difficulty communicating with the locals.

[hedge]

It's the same when Americans go to West Virginia...

[Jungle Rat]

My butt itches

[Bklyn]

Like the cheeks...or inside, in the meat?

[Jungle Rat]

Takes a wholes two fingers.

[Saint]

Try wetting the TP next time, dipshit.

[Jungle Rat]

I always use wet wilpes. Learn.

[eCat]

It's the same when Americans go to West Virginia...

I've known people that have their own dialect

like their dad was bat shit crazy and the kids learned to talk like him - that's probably how that shit gets started in all languages really

[Saint]

Pretty much. There are people around here who don't even sound like they're from the south while others talk like extras on Hee Haw.

[hedge]

I wish you were an extra on Hee Haw: Stringbean, to be exact...

[eCat]

I wonder how many people got that reference without having to look it up

[AlabamAlum]

I got it.

[Bklyn]

That was totally cultural. I'm sitting this one out.

[aTm]

I wish you would sit out...of life.

[AlabamAlum]

Just tell people that you don't believe in banks and keep your money at home.

[Bklyn]

I wish you would sit out...of life.

Meh...hedge is better.

[Saint]

Yet, despite her drug=addled lifestyle and whorish ways, Lulu lived on while Stringbean had to die.

[Jungle Rat]

Hee Haw? Really? You can do better. Please try.