[EvilCapitalist]

Ricotta is great with baked ziti.

[monkeyshine]

Where did gabagool come from?

[EEGator]

It’s sauce, not gravy...

[pepsi_junkie]

If someone know what gabagool is then you have a pretty good sense of exactly where they grew up.

[TexasGator]

How did squid become calimari?

[jerseyman]

Despite my Freeper name, I no longer live in New Jersey.
I am a refugee from the high cost of living and high taxes.
What do I miss most from New Jersey? The Italian restaurants.
It’s just not the same in the South.

[who_would_fardels_bear]

I was in a deli and ordered a sandwich with prozhute and capacoal.

A woman with an FBI T-Shirt (Full Blooded Italian) criticized my pronunciation. I told her I was part Italian and that was how my mom pronounced the words. My mom is from the east coast.

The woman with the FBI T-shirt said she was from Chicago. So evidently Chicago was populated by northern Italians.

[allendale]

Many Italians started dropping vowels as soon as they arrived in America.

[DLfromthedesert]

All 4 of my grandparents were from Sicily. My parents spoke to each other in the Sicilian Italian dialect, but spoke to us only in English. Wanted us to learn the correct Italian taught in our school.

[tflabo]

For mozzarella cheese they say ‘moozadell’. Northeast Italian Ebonics.

[pinkandgreenmom]

I’ll just drop this here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcp8rN-YqLw

[cpdiii]

I lived in Valenzuela where Spanish is spoken, not Italian.

“How calamari became galamar and ricotta became rigott.”

Calamari is calamari and ricotta is ricotta. This thread confuses me.

[Bonemaker]

"..but I didn't grow up speaking a lick of the mellifluous tongue.."

I think it's a beautiful Romance language such as...

"...Mangia merda e muori..."

[Fiji Hill]

Tu vuo' fa' l'americano (you're acting like an American)--Renato Casarone (1956)

You're acting like an American!
You drink whiskey and soda;
You're doing rock and roll dancing;
You play baseball:
You smoke Camels,
But you were born in Italy!

[Prov1322]

Pronto!

[Vision]

Sloth.

[gr8eman]

New Jersey is a wonderfully diverse place.

Stopped reading right there. It's a sh-t hole of epic proportions. Unfortunately I had to go there to see my aging mother!

[Salvey]

H.L. Mencken addressed this in 1919 in his marvelous book, “The American Language.”

[Some Fat Guy in L.A.]

I wonder about the first guy that grabbed the tentacle of a dead squid and said to himself “I’m gonna eat that”....

[Truthoverpower]

South jersey has great Italian food 🥘. Cape May county in particular

Philly influence. Philly has the BEST MANGIA Hands down-a !

Capisce?