19 July, 2016

How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained | Atlas Obscura

How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained | Atlas Obscura: "If you were to go to southern Italy, you wouldn’t find people saying “gabagool.” But some of the old quirks of the old languages survived into the accents of Standard Italian used there. In Sicily or Calabria, you might indeed find someone ordering “mutzadell.” In their own weird way, Jersey (and New York and Rhode Island and Philadelphia) Italians are keeping the flame of their languages alive even better than Italian-Italians. There’s something both a little silly and a little wonderful about someone who doesn’t even speak the language putting on an antiquated accent for a dead sub-language to order some cheese.

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