If you’ve ever seen ‘The Sopranos’ or any movies or shows with Italian Americans from New York or Jersey, you may have heard food names like [Pro-shoot] or [bra-zhol]. For many people who only speak standard Italian, these words may make no sense. I wanted to go a bit into these pronunciations, but let’s set it up first.
In the late nineteenth century, many Italians started emigrating to the northeastern US, most of whom from southern Italy. These folks spoke languages like Sicilian or Napolitan, among others, and very few spoke standard Italian or English. So there was this initial difficulty in understanding each other and a sort of ‘pidgin’ evolved out of this.
Now a feature in certain languages in southern Italy is clipping final vowels, and some voiceless consonants may seem voiced after vowels. What does that mean? If you put your hand on your throat and say ‘g’, you’ll feel your vocal cords vibrating, but if you say ‘k’ they don’t. Both these letters are velar plosives, but k is voiceless and g is voiced. There are other pairs of voiced and voiceless ones, like b and p. In the languages I mentioned, with voicing voiceless consonants, clipping the final vowel, and adding the influence of American English, we got this:
Capocolo becomes gabagul. Braciole or bracciole becomes ‘bra-zhol’. Prosciutto becomes ‘pro-shoot’. Manicotti becomes ‘manigot’. Ricotta becomes ‘ri-got’. This manner of speech is slowly getting lost, unfortunately, but it is important to understand the history behind it and not to assume these are wrong pronunciations.
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