How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained. Mulberry Street, where New York’s “Little Italy” is centered, c. The casts are heavily Italian- American, but few of them can actually speak, in any real way, the Italian language. Regardless, when they talk about food, even food that’s widely known by the non- Italian population, they often use a specific accent. And it’s a weird one. But for people outside those groups, and even, often, inside them, it’s next to impossible to pick out a specific regional accent in the way a Jewish American says “challah” or a Korean- American says “jjigae.” How can someone who doesn’t speak the language possibly have an regional accent? Yet Italian- Americans do. It’s even been parodied; on an episode of Kroll Show, comedian Nick Kroll’s character Bobby Bottleservice, a Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino- type, describes his lunch in this thick accent, eliminating the final syllable of each item. The situation is so complicated that the terms used to describe pockets of language are not widely agreed upon; some use “language,” some use “dialect,” some use “accent,” and some use “variation.” Linguists like to argue about the terminology of this kind of thing. A map of Italy from 1. Before 1. 86. 1, 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. White Women Do It, Too: 8 Things Black Women Can’t Get Away With. Drama: Kill Me, Heal Me Revised romanization: Kilmi, Hilmi Hangul: 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 1. 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 8. 0 percent of Italian- Americans are of southern Italian descent, says Fred Gardaphe, a professor of Italian- American studies at Queens College. 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. 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. The one that they picked was Tuscan, and they probably picked it because it was the language of Dante, the most famous Italian writer. 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 1. 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. Mozzarella, or sometimes “mutzadell”. It sometimes dies out quickly; people assimilate, speak the most popular language wherever they live, stop teaching their children the old language. But sometimes, the language has a firmer hold on its speakers than most, and refuses to entirely let go. The Italian dialects are like that.“I grew up speaking English and Italian dialects from my family’s region of Puglia,” says Gardaphe. They recognized that I was speaking as if I was a 7. I was only 2. 6 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. I didn't expect to like this drama, but I did. And apparently, so did the Korean viewers with its continuously rising ratings. I love the fast pacing, as. Yahoo!-ABC News Network . All rights reserved. In 2011, the Arizona Board of Education considered if teachers who speak with an accent are fluent in English. There’s a spectrum to all this, of course. Somebody, even in their 7. Italy and lived in the US can still be understood in Italy. But Italian has undergone huge standardization changes in the past few decades, and it’ll be hard for modern Italian speakers to understand them, even harder than if somebody showed up in New York in 2. New Yorker “Thoity- Thoid Street” slang and accent. For whatever reason, foods and curse words linger longer in a disrupted language. I think of my own complete lack of knowledge of Yiddish, with my lousy vocabulary made up entirely of words like blintzes, kugel, kvetch, nudnik, and schmuck. If you can’t eat them or yell them, foreign words don’t often stick around. Ann Marie Olivo- Shaw, who grew up on and studied the sociolinguistics of Long Island, thinks the various pockets of southern Italian immigrants could understand each other, sort of, a little. Culinarily similarities also abound: less meat- heavy, more like Provence or Greece in the use of seafood, vegetables, and even, rare for western Europe, spice. Let’s do a fun experiment and take three separate linguistic trends from southern Italian dialects and combine them all to show how one Standard Italian word can be so thoroughly mangled in the U. S. First: “The features that you’ll find across a lot of these dialects, and one that you still hear a lot in southern Italy today, is vowels at the ends of words are pronounced very very softly, and usually as more of an . D’Imperio is a little more extreme, calling it “vowel deletion.” Basically: if the final syllable is a vowel? You can get rid of it. Vowel deletion is common amongst many languages, and is done for the same reason that, sometimes, vowels are added: to make the flow from one word to another more seamless. It’s easiest, in terms of muscle movement, to transition from a vowel to a consonant and vice versa. A vowel to a vowel is difficult; in English, that’s why we have “a” versus “an” in phrases like “a potato” or “an apple.” Some Italian words that would follow food words, like prepositions or articles, would start with a vowel, and it’s easier to just remove it so you don’t have to do the vowel- to- vowel transition. The stereotypical Italian “It’s a- me, Mario!” addition of a vowel is done for the same reason: Italian is a very fluid, musical language, and Italian speakers will try to eliminate the awkwardness of going consonant- to- consonant. So they’ll just add in a generic vowel sound—“ah” or “uh”—between consonants, to make it flow better. Second: “A lot of the . Got it: O=Ooh. And third: “A lot of what we call the voiceless consonants, like a . This is a tricky one to explain, but basically the difference between a voiced and a voiceless consonant can be felt if you place your fingers over your Adam’s apple and say as short of a sound with that consonant as you can. A voiced consonant will cause a vibration, and voiceless will not. So like, when you try to just make a “g” sound, it’ll come out as “guh.” But a “k” sound can be made without using your vocal cords at all, preventing a vibration. So “k” would be voiceless, and “g” would be voiced. It’s fun. Okay so, we’ve got three linguistic quirks common to most of the southern Italian ancient languages. Now try to pronounce “capicola.”The “c” sounds, which are really “k” sounds, become voiced, so they turn into “g”. Do the same with the “p”; that’s a voiceless consonant, and we want voiced ones, so change that to a “b”. The second- to- last vowel, an “oh” sound, gets raised, so change that to an “ooh.” And toss out the last syllable. It’s just a vowel, who needs it? Now try again. Yeah. Gabagool. If you were to go to southern Italy, you wouldn’t find people saying “gabagool.” But some of the old quirks of the old languages survived into the accents of Standard Italian used there. In Sicily or Calabria, you might indeed find someone ordering “mutzadell.” In their own weird way, Jersey (and New York and Rhode Island and Philadelphia) Italians are keeping the flame of their languages alive even better than Italian- Italians. There’s something both a little silly and a little wonderful about someone who doesn’t even speak the language putting on an antiquated accent for a dead sub- language to order some cheese.“Language is so much a part of how we identify,” says Olivo- Shaw. I think that for Italians, we have such a pride in our ancestry and such a pride in our culture that it’s just kind of an unconscious way of expressing that.” Update, 1. An earlier version of the story had the wrong age for Fred Gardaphe.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
June 2017
Categories |