A few years ago, I was in a deli in Vegas behind a New Yorker trying to order a pound of sliced "gabba-goo". After the girl behind the counter kept asking him "What"?, & him continuing to repeat "gabba-goo", I finally stepped up & translated: "capicola". The counter person thanked me, & he took his order & left, still convinced neither of US knew how to pronounce Italian.
I used to work in a deli in Brooklyn. My favorite had always been people ordering Soppressata and arguing with the very Italian owner that it's sopposed to be pronounced Super Sod.
How did it happen? Languages change. Italian Americans generally have ancestry from Sicily or around Naples, and their ancestors did not speak standard Italian. So it doesn't make any sense to expect that their grandchildren or great grand children would pronounce this like standard Italian. It also doesn't make sense to blame them for not speaking a language which they have never spoken. And in the nearly century and a half since their ancestors arrived in Brooklyn or Staten Island, the language has changed. It's quite easy to understand.
The Italian-Americans, particularly from the NYC/NJ area, preserve older accents of Italian dialects as they sounded over 100 years ago. (Of course with some influence from Northeastern USA English, like pronouncing the trilled "r" more like a "d".) But the peninsular Italians telling them they're pronouncing things wrong and laugiung attheir pronunciations don't realize that many of their ancestors probably pronounced it closer to the way the Italian-Americans do; Italian became more standardized in Italy itself,i ncluding the accents. Many Brits, by the way, act snooty as if their English is inherently more pure (ignoring the many accents in Britain itself) but many American accents probably sound closer to the way Elizabethan English sounded.
@@masterjunky863They might, but they are still speaking standard Italian not so-called Southern dialects which most linguists would actually call separate languages.
Because most Italian Americans had family that immigrated before Italy had 1 fluid language. The language being spoken in the US is from the old Italy before hand and a mix of the different dialects from the South. My father is from Italy and immigrated to the US in the 50s. He speaks Italian yet when he goes back there are many difficulties speaking to some of the people in different regions.
@@sstills951 Well then you're uneducated. As someone who's 0% Italian, I don't care one way or the other. But Chris is right. Dialects are a real thing, and they can die out in the original country but remain in a foreign country. Perhaps it is somewhat bastardized, but they're not going to switch over to "standard Italian" just because Italy did in the last few decades. American Italian pronunciation is its own thing now. I think it's cool to see how languages evolve in different contexts.
@@sstills951 Nah it's true, there have been articles on it. The way Northeastern Italian-Americans pronounce these words is leftover from mostly dead old dialects their ancestors brought over.
@@sstills951 The Italian language hadn't existed for very long when Italians were immigrating en masse to to the US, first of all. Italian is a new language that was developed out of the regional dialect of Tuscany in the 1800s. Italy has regional languages and dialects all over it even still to today. If everyone in a place says something one way and understands what everyone in that community means, that's how it's said. It's not "wrong" just "different" when compared to standard Italian. The only bad thing Staten Islanders are doing is trying to convince everyone that their pronunciations are "the one true authentic" way of saying those words.
Second generation here and I am proud to say my pronunciation is spot on. Both sides of the family are from Calabria. But like every country, we all do have our own dialects.
I think what they speak in Staten Island (my daughter and her ancestors are from there) is Sicilian. The reason is that one day I was in an Italian supermarket and I picked up a box of pasta, normally used to make PASTA E FAGGIOLI (pasta and beans). In the back of the box, it explained that in Sicilian, they say PASTA FAZOOL, which is what all the Islanders I know call it. Maybe all those other pronunciations are Sicilian. There are also many articles on Google about Italian and its different pronunciations.
Lots of Italian Americans came from Naples, where Cs morphed into Gs, and the endings of words were dropped. That's the way the old people from Naples talked back then; we preserve the pattern here.
The reason we pronounce Italian words funny compared to this is two-fold: 1. the Italian spoken on the east coast was passed down from several generations ago, and never kept up with the times -- just like English sounded different 100+ years ago, so does Italian; 2. the Italian spoken in different regions sounds different -- just like people from the South in the US don't sound like folks in the North in the US there are different dialects in Italian. Take those two things together, and add a little Sopranos, and you get manigawt
This is humorous. New York Italian is the Italian of southern Italy in 1900, Neapolitan. When Italy was politically unified around 1870, Italians spoke a number of different dialects. The government decided that it would help unification if all Italians spoke the same dialect and decided upon one particular dialect spoken in northern Italy. At the time of the great Italian immigration to America (late 19th - early 20th Century) the southern Italians had not yet switched to the new northern dialect that the government was promoting. They were still speaking the Neapolitan dialect of southern Italy. It was and is not a bastardized version of Italian, just a different one from the new dialect that ultimately became the "official" dialect of Italy. Incidentally, Neapolitan is in many ways closer to the original Latin language than the dialect that was chosen for the country.
Oh !! Bari is where my Great , Great Grandfather was chief of the Police decade's ago and my late Fathers , father And his grandfather is from . one day? I will go to Bellissimo Bari Italy 🇮🇹 and trace my family history there. Grazie for sharing from native born New Yorker of the Bronx.
It is my understanding that the majority of our ancestors came from Naples and Sicily. Two regions that dont speak Italian. Napulitano is its own language with varying dialects as well as Siculo. The Napulitano and Siculo that our ancestors spoke all those years ago is not the same as it was. Just think back on how our parents spoke when they were kids, “groovy” “far-out” etc. If you heard an Italian speaking English like that today you would be shocked. This is a conversation that involves a history lesson.
You got it! I'm in the minority--my ancestors were from the North, so they spoke Piemontese. We pronounced risotto, for example, something like "le-zeut". My grandma didn't want me to learn to speak "Italian," but I took it in college and when I tried to talk to my great-uncles using my Roma italiano, they just laughed and asked me if they were supposed to know what I was saying! I still want to learn Piemontese just because!
@@angelavietto5179 "Roma Italian" is not a thing, the language is Italian and it's spoken all over the country. Local dialects are going extinct in the north, I can assure you that the overwhelming majority of people in Piemonte speak plain Italian with a local accent that mostly affects only vowels. In the south dialects are still spoken but everyone understands Italian because they went to school. All schools in Italy use the same language: Italian.
The way we pronounce these words in NYese is primarily from the Neapolitan language, so asking people to say them in Italian is no different from asking a Portuguese or French speaker to pronounce them.
"Cannoli" "Canoli" "CaNNoli" Italian is easy, you just need to learn letters and syllables pronunciation and that's it, you read it as you see, no silent letters, no strange things and, very important, read the last vowel because is the most important letter in a word because it tells you everything, if the word is singular or plural and which adjective you should put before it.
Plenty of silent letters and irregularities my friend. Compared to English Italian is very phonetically transparent but far from perfect. There are more transparent languages
Italian Americans speak old southern and Napoli dialect. That's why it's different than modern Italian. We have to remember the context of Italian immigration to the United states
But actually, we haven't: there is a rich linguistic history as to why Italian-American Italian sounds different from the Italian spoken in 21st Century Italy and it doesn't mean that one is more correct than the other, just that they evolved differently. Besides the Italian spoke by the Italians in this video is the language of Northern Italy which was imposed on the rest of the state for the sake of forming a national identity post WWI and the lion share of Italian Americans emigrated from Italy prior to this language shift. So Italian Americans are speaking Italian correctly; we're just speaking the specific language of our ancestors. _See_ www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-capicola-became-gabagool-the-italian-new-jersey-accent-explained
@@LetYourLiteShine17 no you're not, you are foreigners trying and failing to pronounce a language that is not yours. Your version only vaguely resembles century-old variations of Sicilian and Neapolitan dialects and it's completely distorted by the underlying English which is your one and only native language
@@LetYourLiteShine17 nope. What you think is Italian, but different because of bla bla immigration reasons, it's just not Italian. It's a mix of dialects from Campania. A dialect spoken and brought there by illiterates . And that's how you'd sound using that words in Italy.
The "g" in place of the c and the "d" in place of the ll is from the Sicilian dialect, so it's not un-Italian to say gumbah in place of compare. It's just a more informal way of speaking. Our forebears said it that way, and they were just as Italian as those in this video.
Don't be embarrassed, there is a rich linguistic history as to why Italian-American Italian sounds different from the Italian spoken in 21st Century Italy and it doesn't mean that one is more correct than the other, just that they evolved differently. Besides the Italian spoken by the Italians in this video is the language of Northern Italy which was imposed on the rest of the state for the sake of forming a national identity post WWI and the lion share of Italian Americans emigrated from Italy prior to this language shift. So Italian Americans are speaking Italian correctly; we're just speaking the specific language of our ancestors.
@@LetYourLiteShine17 There's a correct way to speak Italian, you aren't pronouncing it correctly. Go to an Italian town and ask for Gabagoo, Rigot and Galamad, they'll laugh at you. You are speaking a bastardized version of Italian, phonetically influenced by both Southern dialects and English. Don't pretend you're right. Go to an Italian school and learn proper Italian. Also please, you know nothing about the history of Italy. "Modern" Italian language is based on medieval and modern Florentine, and the process of standardizing it begins with the unification of the country, back in the 1860s.
@@matteobertottiFew in the US pronounce the "h" as "haitch" or call the trunk of their car the "boot" like they do in the UK. Languages have dialects with different pronunciations and slang words. That's all these words are.
@@cjaquilino Yeah, but these people don't even know the basic grammar of Italian; they speak English with some "Italian" words, and pretend it's something correct. You have Italian dialects and languages, spoken in different places. This answers your point. But again, these folks aren't even able to write a basic sentence, they're communicating in English.
@@matteobertotti Look up creole, patois, and slangs in linguistics. Italian Americans don't think, for instance, "mootzedell" is the correct Italian pronunciation of "mozzerella". That's specifically a New York City area regional/dialectical thing, it's not even pronounced the same in Chicago or New Haven where, again, as slang it's called "mootz".
NYers are in a rush and leave off final letters, not only do they leave off final R's. with Italian words they leave off the final vowel. Mozzarell, calamar ricott. Now let's go for a pizz
@@Silivedotcom But actually it was misleading so....where's your journalistic integrity? As a paper for a region which has a large percentage of Italian Americans one would have hoped that you would have approached this topic within the fascinating and nuanced historical context of the way Italian-American Italian developed. The best thing this video did was bring this article, which was offered by a commenter, to my attention: www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-capicola-became-gabagool-the-italian-new-jersey-accent-explained
Who gives a shit. Gravy makes it sound special. And literally translates to sauce made with cooked meat juices(fat). So if an Italian translated Sugo it would be gravy
You can rest assured that no Italian from Italy would ever say gravy, most have never even heard the word and those who have associate it with that brown sauce you put on potatoes
if those guys (or someone else from the south of italy) would pronounce those words in their dialects, they would sound much more similar to the US-italian stereotype. The problem is that those "wrong" pronounces are an approximate version of the old dialects that the Italian immigrants were speaking when they moved to America. Nearly nobody spoke correct/modern italian in those years, nor they knew how many of those words were written. Then the other Americans and their own US-born children and grandchildren didn't know how to correctly emulate the pronounce and that's how those wrong words came out.
Also Hollywood popularised many wrong/stereotypical pronunciations and incredibly enough Italian-Americans adopted them, resulting in the mockery that you see today when they try to say "Italian" words
No bro, the phonetic of this wrong words is clearly Anglophone, italian dialects and leanguage never used this kind of phonetic, im italian i know my lenguage and my history, and i know ho latin lenguage works
Its Brooklynese! Lol. Grew up up in Bensonhurst Brooklyn and heard all these words the Brooklyn way,not the proper italian way. Live in Florida and still order at local deli,Gabagool and Mutzadel!
Look, I'm happy that we're keeping our culture, our traditions alive. So we don't pronounce the words the way they are supposed to be pronounced, we're Italian Americans from generations and generations and that's the reason. Whatever you call them, Italian cuisine is one of the best in the world!
From what I understand, dropping the last vowel was something that Italian Americans used because they weren't fluid in English. Dropping the last vowel sounded more "American" to them as they tried to assimilate to their new life in a new land.
What part of Italy were you? Go to Naples area and that is the local dialect. Neopolitans frequently drop the last vowel. Saying ricot, as in ricotta in Naples is not that unusual.
I’ve never understood why Italian Americans always cut the last vowel out at pronouncing foods and words. They say Manicot instead of Manicotti, or biscot instead of biscotti. WHY????😫
Annnnd historically inaccurate b/c Italian-American Italian sounds different for specific linguistic reasons & that doesn't make Italian American pronunciations incorrect. We still speak English in 21st Century United States, but we don't speak it exactly like our British founders did nor did _they_ speak the same English as the original colonizers. All different, and all correct w/in the historical context of their linguistic developments.
All these third and fourth generation Italians try to correct my pronunciation of Italian foods. Meanwhile they know like a couple dozen words and butcher them at that.
@@TheGrandeperuzzi Assuming you mean pronounce, not spell? If so, is it a specific dialect for the 2%? It used to be somewhat rare to hear around NYC, but I haven't lived there for a while. Apparently it's caught on, since.
So many misconceptions. Dante wrote La Divina Commedia in Italian in 1308. The official languages of the KIngdom of the Two Sicilies were Italian and Latin, before the establishment of Italy the same languages, Latin and Italian were the official languages of the earlier Kingdom of Naples and Italian was the official language of the KIngdom of Sicily too starting in 1532 and until it merged with the Kingdom of Naples to become the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. So, Italian was not a "new" language when the southern Italians immigrated to the U.S., it is just that the most of the southern Italians that immigrated to the U.S. were a minority of the poorest and least educated of the southern Italians, so they did not speak proper Italian and were mostly illiterate. It would be like considering the speech of the poor uneducated people from Appalachia in the late 1800s as representing how everyone spoke in the U.S. at that time.
Thank you for this. It’s so annoying that my friend pronounces ricotta, to sound like “rigawt”. It’s fu$@ing annoying af. She says, that’s the way Italians say it. I told her a million times, it’s not the way Italians say it.
I’m from a family of Bostonian Italian Americans. We say all these words right. The first time I heard New York pronounciations I was confused. We do it right with the Italians New York just combined the accent and mixed it up lol still love my NY Italian brothers🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹
In italy we hate you both, Please mate be proud to be american Chinese culture is more similar to the the real italian culture than italian american culture with us 😂
La pronuncia italiana e' differente della pronuncia di New York perche gli immiranti erano del sud e hanno parlato dialetto, non la lingua italiana. C'e' Bari, dove parlano napoletano come gli immigranti, ma con un'altra accento.
We're not mis-pronouncing words, it's a hold over from certain towns in italy where the dialect is different. Those people moved here and brought it with them and carried it on.
Eddie Going it’s a little more complicated than that. www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-capicola-became-gabagool-the-italian-new-jersey-accent-explained We’re effectively using an 1860’s southern Italian dialect, because “Italy” as a country is a patchwork of hundreds of ancient countries with dialects that could be mutually unintelligible. Essentially, we’re wrong, but our grandparents and great-grandparents would be pissed if we dare “mispronounce” what they had learned as “correct”.
it is more complicated than that, but you're still mispronouncing those words! They do come from dialects, mostly, but the pronunciation and the spelling are quite different
The language in Italy nowadays is not the language as it was spoken hundreds of years ago (at least in every region). There were different dialects spread throughout. The way new yorkers/jersey people pronounce these phrases are remnants of speech that are from sicily. And not modern sicily, but Sicily from 150 years ago. There are interesting articles out there where linguists study these pronunciations, and have found that our botched american italian speak is like a time-capsule-ised form of the language.
Italian are being taught the proper way to speak through their school system and is used throughout the country. Dialects are used in small local towns.
Not really. These pronunciations were created in people's homes long before that show ever existed. So much for stereotypes, people think that all of us Italian-Americans are like this. 🙄
Imagine going to a whole country trying to be a hero for your new york Italian heritage, and completely butchering every wors you ask them to pronounce, lol. EMBARRASSED
Because these people are speaking actual Italian and not a dialect that disappeared 40 years ago from every day conversation. The Italians in America don't speak Italian, they just remember the name of foods in the old dialect that's now dead just like Latin is dead.
