[xkaydet65]

I taught for ten years in the 70s in northern Bushwick in Brooklyn. It was the home to the last wave of Italian immigration, the postwarera. I keep in touch with a lot of the kids I taught. One funny thing. They mostly stayed bilingual but many on visiting Italy, to their parents towns, whether in Sicily or Calabria or the Alto Adige, the locals had trouble understanding them since starting with Musolinni and continuing post war local dialects were suppressed and replaced with Roman Italian.

[Antoninus]

One funny thing. They mostly stayed bilingual but many on visiting Italy, to their parents towns, whether in Sicily or Calabria or the Alto Adige, the locals had trouble understanding them...

Yup. My mother had the same problem. She grew up bilingual in the US in the 1940s and 50s. When she spoke to her younger cousins in Italy in the 1990s, they all laughed at her Italian because it was so old-fashioned. It was as if we were speaking to someone who spoke Victorian English.