THE NEW LANGUAGE INVENTED BY

ITALIAN IMMIGRANTS IN AMERICA

Italians who visit the United States, when they come in contact with the second or third generation immigrants’ descendents, are often puzzled; stunned and sometimes horrified by the language used by people they consider Italian like themselves. It is the same reaction experienced by the visitors, journalists and consular employees who arrived here decades ago. The language they heard was not Italian; it was not a dialect of Italian and certainly it was not English; but a hodge-podge that contained a bit of Italian and a bit of dialect (which varied with the geographical origin of the individual); built over a foundation of English pronounced the Italian way, with a rounded vowel at the end of each word.
Examples: contrattore [contractor], tracca [track], picco [pick], grosseria [grocery], bordante [boarder]. Their surprise grew when they found the written version of this lingo[1] (often with many variations) in restaurant menus, classified ads in newspapers and even in official documents drafted by American authorities who wanted to make sure they were understood by Italian immigrants. A couple of examples are scalloppini [it should be scaloppine] and tailors of cotti [coats]. The language of Italian Americans, therefore, is composed of a series of distortions of English rather than the Anglicization of Italian. This was clearly the result of an effort by a mass of poor, ignorant peasants who wanted to communicate with foreign-language workmates and the bosses their livelihood depended on. It wasn't a spontaneous, poetic language that individuals developed for themselves. It was a form of forced communication, similar—if I may use this comparison—to cooking food in a pressure cooker that readies a meal in a few minutes instead of hours.

An analysis of the words of this lingo easily reveals that it contains mostly nouns. A small percentage of adjectives are also present but with much lower frequency than in Italian or English. In shaping this language the immigrants satisfied the urgency of their communicative needs. We find: pezze [pieces, meaning dollars], bosso [boss] and olivetta [elevated railroad]. But we don’t find words for good, beautiful, true, false, right, wrong. At most we see orrè [hurray], a cry heard in theaters or stadiums to express emotional admiration; and naise [nice], a positive evaluation. The need to find and keep a job and the pressure to earn money explain the structure, dictionary and intonation of this interlingua.[2] The lexicon is functional and pragmatic containing just a list of nouns. There are no adaptations or transformations of words that convey emotions or subjective evaluation. Those who hear it, after a while can pick up a certain tone of disdain, spite, rancor and revolt: the Italian ear doesn’t respond favorably to it because the words contain something harsh and broken and, often, forcibly hard-pushed. Even love is presented as a physical function; different from the role it has in Italian dialects where it occupies a preeminent position in popular poetry to express emotions even deeper than those of the literary language. Here it becomes less spiritual and more materialistic, betraying a sense of hostility toward non-Italian women who are described as mocking and taking advantage of immigrant males. The ghella is far removed from the concept of girl and even more from that of ragazza. To be noted is also the linguistic phenomenon called phonetic adaptation whereby, when a foreign word enters a language, the speakers find in their own language a word with a similar sound. The speakers’ native words lose their original meaning and adopt those of the foreign words, thus changing the former original meaning. This is how shovel became sciabola [in Italian it means saber] and the worker that uses it is a sciabolatore [in the sport of fencing sciabolatore is sabreur, a swordsman with a saber.] Elevated railways became olivetta [little olive], tunnel became tonno [tuna fish], later replaced by tubo [tube]. Mulberry Street, the center of New York’s Little Italy became Mòrbeda, with obvious phonetic assonance with morbida [soft]. The town of Hoboken, in New Jersey, morphed into Obocchino, resonant of bocchino [cigarette holder]. At the top of them all is Broccolino, that transforms Brooklyn into a vegetable [small broccoli.]

A curious phenomenon, albeit rare, is the imitation of English words such as officer that, converted into the immigrants’ language, became ufficiale. Presently, in Italian the noun ufficiale is used only to define the highest range of military ranks. Interestingly, by extending the meaning to cover functionaries and elected office-holders, the word reverted back to the original Italian meaning, with a semantic value similar to that of contemporary English. It thus has the appearance of a thirteen century Tuscan term rather than a nineteenth century foreign borrowing: instead of being lifted from the pages of the Progresso Italo-Americano, it looks like it was taken from Dino Compagni’s Cronica. [3] Not to be mistaken: the members of Italian associations that use this term are unaware of its history and evolution. They saw it in English-language newspapers or in the bylaws of American associations and they copied it as it was.

At times the marriage of Italian and English is steeped in dialect, as in the case of coppetane [‘ncuop + town]: ‘ncuop literally means on top, above, over; and it designates the section of town that is up. Thus, coppetane designates New York’s Uptown. This, at least, is the Neapolitan version. Sicilians say oppitani, with a different phonetic rendition of up. Regardless of the version, it all feels chopped up, stuttered, maltreated and minced. Another noticeable phenomenon is the disappearance from the lingo of words that are no longer needed. For example, since sanitary conditions have improved over the years and new buildings have indoor plumbing and bathrooms; the word baccauso [backhouse, outdoors latrines in the back of the house] has disappeared.

In a few generations this entire terminology will be gone as the few new immigrants who are still arriving face different conditions. In Italy they learned the grammatical foundations of Italian and here, as soon as they go to school and learn English (adults included), they are the first ones to be horrified by the rough linguistic mixture used by the old immigrants. This difference in linguistic sensibility first appeared between two groups of immigrants separated by the historical landmark of World War II: those who arrived before 1940 and those who emigrated after 1945. This also marks the abyss that exists between these generations. The fact that these two don’t speak the same language represents one of the most important phenomena in the history of Italian immigration.

It is also important to notice that in the field of journalism two different trends developed after a protracted struggle. At the very beginning, Italian-language dailies and periodicals were written and edited by professionals who came from Italy and who knew Italian quite well. Approximately after 1900 the innovation of classified ads was introduced and it became impossible for editors to hide or translate into proper Italian the lingo created by Italian American workers. Leafing through the newspaper Bollettino della Sera of 1917, I found classified ads containing words like giobbisti [jobbers], pressatori and sottopressatori [pressers, pressers’ helpers], operatori [operators] and sceperi [garment shapers]. I also found announcements for a mezzo-giovane,[4] mezzo-sciainatore and mezzo-barista. Mezzo [half] stands for part-time; and the jobs respectively refer shop helper, shoeshine and bartender. A farm house is always a farma; the trolley is the carro elettrico [electric wagon] and heat is stima [steam], whence the frequent and involuntarily ironic announcements about houses for sale without stima, i.e. without appreciable value.[5]

Today the situation is quite different. In the classified ads of the Progresso Italo-Americano those expressions are almost gone. The old generation that still uses them has retired with nice pensions and their children—comfortable and secure in society—no longer need to look for jobs in the pages of Italian-language newspapers. The most recent immigrants from Italy looking for jobs speak a decent Italian and don’t need to read the announcements translated into the old lingo. Nobody looks anymore to buy or lease a fruttistenne [fruit stand]. At the same time words like bar and barista[6] are now commonly used in Italy. Even the newly-arrived grignollo [green horn] knows them.

The ignorance of English words assimilated into Italian created a doubling of the meaning as, for instance, in the case observed by linguists of the word canabuldog. This word reproduces the Italian duplication in cane bulldog [dog bulldog]. [7] By the way, because of phonetic preferences, Florentines call it cane busdroghe. The same phenomenon appeared in Sicily during the Arabic domination of the island,[8] with the creation of the toponymies Mongibello (in Arabic Gebel means mount, therefore Mongibello, crasis of Monte Gebel, means Mount Mount); and Porto di Marsala (Marsala means Allah’s port: the literal meaning is Port of Allah’s port). The most recent repetition/duplication[9] that has spread all over America is pizza-pie, which, translated into Italian, means pizza-pizza. This term is not having much success in advertisement or in store signs, although it is very common in everyday language. It should also be noted that in the last decade, starting around 1950, Italy’s improved economical conditions and the stream of American tourists who visit Italy along with the considerable amount of imported Italian products to the United States, from craft to advanced manufacture; have injected new genuine Italian words into English. For instance, the word pizza is winning the battle against pizza-pie and stands by itself against the English duplication.

And now it is time to ask: what kind of footprints will be left by this half-a-century-long linguistic torment? I have reported only a fragment of the information that was collected by linguists like Arthur Livingston[10], Alberto Menarini[11] and Samuel Scalia;[12] or by observers like Dario Papa,[13] Adolfo Rossi,[14] Amy Bernardy[15] and other visitors to the United States who became familiar with Italian immigrants. From the literary standpoint maybe the only traces left by the lingo will be the ironic intonation, the caricature and parody by a few who “stooped down” to listen to that “horrendous speech“ and took a look at the “monsters”[16] generated by cross-breeding the English language with Italian dialects. The scions of Italian bourgeoisie educated in Italian lyceums, practiced their satirical vein by making fun of the ignorant cafoni and their primitive language, thus following in the wake of a long tradition of writers from the beginning of Italian poetry to this very day, from Ciullo d’Alcamo[17] to Renato Fucini.[18] The Italian America lingo was not even adopted by Italian American novelists who staged their works in the milieu of family life. At most, the lingo appears in bits and pieces only as a device to add local color to the stories.

P.S.

Mr. Angelo Ricaldone from Biella, Italy, wrote to tell me about his experience in Australia. As I suspected, he confirmed that Italian immigrants in Australia did the same thing by creating a new lingo. He supplied the following examples. A mother yells at her daughter who is running on the front yard: “Non andare lì che spogli la grassa.” [Meaning: Don’t go there or you will spoil the grass. Literal translation of spogli la grassa: you will undress the fat woman.] Two friends are talking and one describes his relax activities: “Siedo in giardino e rido il buco.” [Meaning: I sit in the backyard and I read a book. Literal translation of rido il buco: I laugh at the hole.] The old Italian immigration to America didn’t even have rido il buco since they were illiterate, unlike the immigration to Australia that took place after World War II.