Happy New Year's Eve!
I come from a First Generation Italian home. My Dad spoke Italian dialect from Bari and I remember my Mom, who was only half "First Generation" telling him never to speak to us kids. She had been taught Italian at school in Brooklyn and she did not want us corrupted by his families way of speaking. My brother ended up being taught standard Italian in school.
There were words that I did know, of course. The curse words...that goes without saying. Well, I never knew that some of the food names that I learned, were actually not standard Italian.
My biggest distinct memory on how we Italians knew food and how the rest of America knew food, was the pasta Manicotti. It is a stuffed tube of pasta with ricotta and mozzarella cheeses inside it. Red sauce is added to a tray of them and then they are baked in the oven.
My story goes like this. There I am at school in Upstate New York. I am alone for the first time in my life and the cafeteria entree that evening is manicotti. Every student on line pronounces it man-a-coti. So I am there, knowing that we Italians call it mon-a-got. What did I do, I mimicked the other kids, so I did not stand out.
I never understood the reason why we spoke the way we did, until I read THIS article from Atlas Obscura dot com, earlier in the week.
There is the complex and complicated explanation of why we pronounce words (especially food words) the way we do. I highly recommend you reading the entire article, or at least skimming it.
Here is the start of the article, to give you a head start into what I am talking about and what the article will be covering.
“Don’t eat gabagool, Grandma,” says Meadow Soprano on an early episode of The Sopranos, perhaps the most famous depiction of Jersey Italian culture in the past few decades. “It’s nothing but fat and nitrates.” The pronunciation of “gabagool,” a mutation of the word "capicola," might surprise a casual viewer, although it and words like it should be familiar to viewers of other New Jersey-based shows like the now-defunct Jersey Shore and The Real Housewives of New Jersey, where food often drives conversation. 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. “Mozzarella” becomes something like “mutzadell.” “Ricotta” becomes “ree-goat.” “Prosciutto” becomes “pruh-zhoot.” There is a mangling of the language in an instantly identifiable way: final syllables are deleted, certain consonants are swapped with others, certain vowels are mutated in certain places.
Most immigrant groups in the U.S. retain certain words and phrases from the old language even if the modern population can’t speak it. 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?
Interested in reading more, please click the link above and yes, I know almost all these words in their mangled form. :-)
