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How Capicola Became Gabagool – The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained

pmontra 11y ago
I'm an Italian living in Italy. AFAIK the article is correct about the history of languages here. I never heard about capicola. I googled for it and discovered that it's called capocollo here, a word I heard but can't identify. It's more commonly known as coppa which is what I've been calling it all my life. It's good :-) Coppa is a cup (the one you win at competitions) but it's also used with other words to denote something being above something else (southern Italy usage and I'm from the north). And that's probably how it relates to capocollo, which is a part of the animal around the neck. You can glimpse the Italian Wikipedia page about it https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppa_(salume) https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppa_(salume)
andrebalza1 11y ago
Italian living in Finland here. I second the theories presented in this article. I'm also recognising in my family the progressive mingling of Italian words with the totally unrelated structures of the weird ugro-finnish language. >For whatever reason, foods and curse words linger longer in a disrupted language. My take on this is that very private situations (family dinners, arguments) create a humorous or angry context that stimulates and reinforces the use of this words. Regarding mashups: I can mention the italian polpetta (meatball) becoming "polpettat" (singular) and "polpetteja" (plural)
carlob 11y ago
There are a couple of things that are not very precise in the article. First of all the history of modern Italian is not quite right: standard Italian actually comes more from the dialects of the center, especially Tuscan and there is literature in standard Italian that far predates the unification of Italy (for example the 14th century Petrarca is still perfectly intelligible by contemporary high school students. The other thing that is overly simplified is that taxes from the wealthier north are really not the cause (or at least not the single cause) of the emigration from the south. Many regions were really poor and not yet industrialized at the turn of the century and not only in the south (Friuli in the northeast was also very poor). I think the main cause of emigration is really lack of employment opportunities and the destinations of these emigrants have been many: there are huge Italian communities in Argentina, Brazil, Germany and Belgium for example.
- gnoway 11y ago
  "During unification, the northern Italian powers decided that having a country that speaks about a dozen different languages would pose a bit of a challenge to their efforts, so they picked one and called it “Standard Italian” and made everyone learn it. The one that they picked was Tuscan, and they probably picked it because it was the language of Dante, the most famous Italian writer." The article was specifically about how the New Jersey Italian American accent came to be, so including details about Southern Italian emigration to South America and the rest of Europe probably wasn't necessary.
  - carlob 11y ago
    But also: "But this gets weird, because most Italian-Americans can trace their immigrant ancestors back to that time between 1861 and World War I, when the vast majority of “Italians,” such as Italy even existed at the time, wouldn’t have spoken the same language at all, and hardly any of them would be speaking the northern Italian dialect that would eventually become Standard Italian."
r-w 11y ago
I would guess that the lingering of food and curse words is maintained by memory formation caused by sense association.

I'm an Italian living in Italy. AFAIK the article is correct about the history of languages here. I never heard about capicola. I googled for it and discovered that it's called capocollo here, a word I heard but can't identify. It's more commonly known as coppa which is what I've been calling it all my life. It's good :-) Coppa is a cup (the one you win at competitions) but it's also used with other words to denote something being above something else (southern Italy usage and I'm from the north). And that's probably how it relates to capocollo, which is a part of the animal around the neck. You can glimpse the Italian Wikipedia page about it https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppa_(salume) https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppa_(salume)

andrebalza1 11y ago

Italian living in Finland here. I second the theories presented in this article. I'm also recognising in my family the progressive mingling of Italian words with the totally unrelated structures of the weird ugro-finnish language. >For whatever reason, foods and curse words linger longer in a disrupted language. My take on this is that very private situations (family dinners, arguments) create a humorous or angry context that stimulates and reinforces the use of this words. Regarding mashups: I can mention the italian polpetta (meatball) becoming "polpettat" (singular) and "polpetteja" (plural)

carlob 11y ago

There are a couple of things that are not very precise in the article. First of all the history of modern Italian is not quite right: standard Italian actually comes more from the dialects of the center, especially Tuscan and there is literature in standard Italian that far predates the unification of Italy (for example the 14th century Petrarca is still perfectly intelligible by contemporary high school students. The other thing that is overly simplified is that taxes from the wealthier north are really not the cause (or at least not the single cause) of the emigration from the south. Many regions were really poor and not yet industrialized at the turn of the century and not only in the south (Friuli in the northeast was also very poor). I think the main cause of emigration is really lack of employment opportunities and the destinations of these emigrants have been many: there are huge Italian communities in Argentina, Brazil, Germany and Belgium for example.

gnoway 11y ago
"During unification, the northern Italian powers decided that having a country that speaks about a dozen different languages would pose a bit of a challenge to their efforts, so they picked one and called it “Standard Italian” and made everyone learn it. The one that they picked was Tuscan, and they probably picked it because it was the language of Dante, the most famous Italian writer." The article was specifically about how the New Jersey Italian American accent came to be, so including details about Southern Italian emigration to South America and the rest of Europe probably wasn't necessary.
- carlob 11y ago
  But also: "But this gets weird, because most Italian-Americans can trace their immigrant ancestors back to that time between 1861 and World War I, when the vast majority of “Italians,” such as Italy even existed at the time, wouldn’t have spoken the same language at all, and hardly any of them would be speaking the northern Italian dialect that would eventually become Standard Italian."

r-w 11y ago

I would guess that the lingering of food and curse words is maintained by memory formation caused by sense association.