Italian American - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaAlthough most will not
speak Italian fluently, a dialect of sorts has arisen among ....
Eighty percent of Italian Americans are of Southern Italian origin; ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_American -

I think most of us have encountered the above in the U.S.

Mae aieri i ea eio, aoa i e eio e aia. (Genovese)
Il mare ieri era olio, ora e olio e aria. (standard Italian)
(Yesterday the sea was calm; today it is agitated.)

Si no ma sci ne sciame, si no nun sciami mica! Calabiran dialect.

"La lingua toscana in bocca romana."(the Florentinn dialect spoken by a Roman).
Supposedly the soft sounds of the florentine combined with the hash utterances
of the Roman give the Italian language its pleasant character.
Is this then standard Italian?



There is, a dilemma for Italian Americans who consider re-learning the language of their ancestors. The formal "Italian" that is taught
in colleges and universities is generally not the "Italian" with which Italian Americans are acquainted. Eighty percent of Italian Americans
are of Southern Italian origin; therefore, the languages spoken by their families who arrived between 1880-1920 were most likely variations
of the Neapolitan and Sicilian dialects with perhaps some degree of influence from Standard Italian. Because the Italian of Italian Americans
comes from a time just after the unification of the state, their language is in many ways anachronistic and demonstrates what the dialects of
Southern Italy used to be at the time. Because of this, Italian Americans studying Italian are often learning a language that does not include
all of the words and phrases they know, and which their ancestors would not have recognized well.

The situation is even more pronounced among Italian Americans whose ancestors came to the United States from Northern Italy. Italian Americans
variously of Emilia-Romagnan, Lombardian, Genoese, Marchigiano, Piedmontese, Venetian and other Northern Italian heritage are even further moved
away, linguistically, from the languages of their ancestors through the contemporary standard Italian language.

This one Italian American lady I knew whose father spoke Piedmontese was always going on and on about her dialect not being the same as standard Italian.
Her father would speak to her in the dialect and she would answer in English too. Also she thought sandia was the Italian word for watermelon.
Seems her father learned Spanish here in California. After more than 50 years she finally learned that sandia was not Italian but Mexican Spanish.

Definetely true. My mother is from Calabria, so naturally has Calabrese dialect. I was taking some classes to learn the proper italian, would ask my mom questions, and some of the words were like a foreign language to her. I'd love to learn the proper italian, but trying to find a decent Italian class has become difficult

I agree,

Finding a good class is very hard. I had a wonderful tutor for about three month, but she needed to move, now I am struggling to fined someone. Good Luck Joe.

__________________
"Where there is hatred let me sow love." Francesco D'Assisi