THE BLACK HAND FORUM

by **chin_gigante** » Wed Jul 29, 2020 2:14 am

Chris Christie wrote: ↑Sun Jul 26, 2020 9:44 am 9:50 in, Tommy Dades: "console-year." Seems most real life usages are closer to this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_WtIeeSuO0

This makes me think back to Valachi, I'd be very surprised if he knew how to spell consigliere, he was likely debriefed along with Italian agents who were able to understand what he was saying, or at least clarify he's saying counselor. Interesting how Consigliere was left in Italian but Sotto-capo wasn't. I wonder if this was reflective of the vernacular on the street or if the FBI decided capo, sottocapo and caporegime would be too confusing.

**Spoke to my relatives today in Alcamo and I asked them to say counselor, it's not a word that gets thrown around normally and it was "gawn-see-gli-air-ee." I also asked them also say it in slo-mo, enunciating each and every syllable. It's similar to what you hear in the movies: Emphasis on the 'e" ending. Outsiders also say Genovese as Jeh-no-veh-see when people from NY will say "Jenna-veese."

Gawn-see-gli-air-ee vs console-year. It's similar to how outsiders (including myself evidently) pronounce names. As a Sicilian who's lived on both sides of the Atlantic I find it interesting. Honestly, when a Brooklynite invoked the name D'Aquila I had no idea who he was inferring to. Dah'queeeee'luh vs Dah'quella. When I lived in Brooklyn my 'mafia cap' must not have been on because I never noticed any of this shit but then I wan't really looking into it.

I've often wondered about why consigliere has lasted as a popular term while capo and sottocapo became boss and underboss, though rappresentante still pops up every now and then. Considering you still find some references to sottocapi around that time I think one of the major contributing factors to the retention of consigliere was the scene in The Godfather where Michael explains to Kay how that position functions in a family.

by **PolackTony** » Tue Jul 28, 2020 7:27 pm

Chris Christie wrote: ↑Sun Jul 26, 2020 9:44 am 9:50 in, Tommy Dades: "console-year." Seems most real life usages are closer to this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_WtIeeSuO0

This makes me think back to Valachi, I'd be very surprised if he knew how to spell consigliere, he was likely debriefed along with Italian agents who were able to understand what he was saying, or at least clarify he's saying counselor. Interesting how Consigliere was left in Italian but Sotto-capo wasn't. I wonder if this was reflective of the vernacular on the street or if the FBI decided capo, sottocapo and caporegime would be too confusing.

**Spoke to my relatives today in Alcamo and I asked them to say counselor, it's not a word that gets thrown around normally and it was "gawn-see-gli-air-ee." I also asked them also say it in slo-mo, enunciating each and every syllable. It's similar to what you hear in the movies: Emphasis on the 'e" ending. Outsiders also say Genovese as Jeh-no-veh-see when people from NY will say "Jenna-veese."

Gawn-see-gli-air-ee vs console-year. It's similar to how outsiders (including myself evidently) pronounce names. As a Sicilian who's lived on both sides of the Atlantic I find it interesting. Honestly, when a Brooklynite invoked the name D'Aquila I had no idea who he was inferring to. Dah'queeeee'luh vs Dah'quella. When I lived in Brooklyn my 'mafia cap' must not have been on because I never noticed any of this shit but then I wan't really looking into it.

It's seemed to me that a lot of the typical Italian-American pronunciations of words and names are more shaped by Napuletano (here meaning the whole southern boot apart from Southern Calabria and Taranto, not Naples more narrowly) phonetics than Sicilian phonetics. The common weakening to the point of elision of an unstressed word final vowel for example. So "Consigliere", comes out as something like "guhn-suh-LYEER-uh" or further weakened to "guhn-suh-LYEER". The pronunciation of the word final "e" in "Consigliere" as "ee" as you describe from your fam is from what I understand very typically Sicilian.

by **Angelo Santino** » Sun Jul 26, 2020 9:44 am

9:50 in, Tommy Dades: "console-year." Seems most real life usages are closer to this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_WtIeeSuO0

This makes me think back to Valachi, I'd be very surprised if he knew how to spell consigliere, he was likely debriefed along with Italian agents who were able to understand what he was saying, or at least clarify he's saying counselor. Interesting how Consigliere was left in Italian but Sotto-capo wasn't. I wonder if this was reflective of the vernacular on the street or if the FBI decided capo, sottocapo and caporegime would be too confusing.

**Spoke to my relatives today in Alcamo and I asked them to say counselor, it's not a word that gets thrown around normally and it was "gawn-see-gli-air-ee." I also asked them also say it in slo-mo, enunciating each and every syllable. It's similar to what you hear in the movies: Emphasis on the 'e" ending. Outsiders also say Genovese as Jeh-no-veh-see when people from NY will say "Jenna-veese."

Gawn-see-gli-air-ee vs console-year. It's similar to how outsiders (including myself evidently) pronounce names. As a Sicilian who's lived on both sides of the Atlantic I find it interesting. Honestly, when a Brooklynite invoked the name D'Aquila I had no idea who he was inferring to. Dah'queeeee'luh vs Dah'quella. When I lived in Brooklyn my 'mafia cap' must not have been on because I never noticed any of this shit but then I wan't really looking into it.

by **Angelo Santino** » Fri Jul 24, 2020 4:59 pm

Met a Bonanno today from Dyker Heights (likely no relation), he speaks Italian, he introduced himself as Boe-nan-noe. Middle "nan" rhymes with "can." I laughed and said "You too, huh?" He asked what and I said nothing.

I made to point to reference this because the way he said it sounds similar to the word "Banana," which may explain how Our Bonannos got that nickname.

by **PolackTony** » Sun Jul 12, 2020 12:46 pm

Chris Christie wrote: ↑Sat Jul 11, 2020 3:10 am And here we go, a 1910 example of Ital-American:

Letters sent to federal prison had to be in English or they would be held up until they could be translated and deemed appropriate (of course some of these instances may have been written by a translator in NY upon request by the sender):
Capturepal.PNG
Capturesar.PNG

Example of a Castellammarese writing in his language, as stated, no Italian from Italy would find that hard to read.
Captureital.PNG

Fascinating documents, thanks for sharing them. While I'm admittedly not a native speaker, looking over the last letter from the Castellammarese it looks to me to simply be standard Italian, not Sicilianu (would welcome correction from someone fluent in both Italian and Sicilianu if I'm wrong here). Therefore it indeed would not have been difficult for anyone who was literate in standard Italian from anywhere to understand it.

From what I understand, while Sicilianu flourished as a courtly, written language in the late Medieval period (the first of the modern vernacular Italic languages to do so, predating the rise of Florentine literature), written Sicilianu had long since fallen into disuse by the 19th century. Thus by the time of the American migration anyone who was literate was by definition literate in Italian, not Sicilianu, which remained strongly entrenched as the oral, vernacular language of the working classes until it was largely displaced by Italian over the 20th century. Even before the Risorgimento, Florentine-derived Italian had become the lingua franca of the educated and literate strata across Italy, resulting in what was often a wide linguistic gulf between the upper class and the common working and peasant folk.

by **Angelo Santino** » Sat Jul 11, 2020 3:10 am

And here we go, a 1910 example of Ital-American:

Letters sent to federal prison had to be in English or they would be held up until they could be translated and deemed appropriate (of course some of these instances may have been written by a translator in NY upon request by the sender):

Capturepal.PNG

Capturesar.PNG

Example of a Castellammarese writing in his language, as stated, no Italian from Italy would find that hard to read.

Captureital.PNG

by **PolackTony** » Mon Jul 06, 2020 12:49 pm

Chris Christie wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 5:55 pm Are there any other Italian speakers on the board? Maybe they can listen to the two youtube examples I provided and give their own opinion? All I can do is provide my own which I already did. I can understand everybody, and from my own research, members of organized crime from various provinces never had a problem either a century prior. If this is this much of a contention perhaps I need to focus more on it in the book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_dw8I169go
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEEPyE-nR58

I'd be interested to see how you wind up dealing with the language question, as I think it's an important, interesting, and complex one. Lots of published scholarly work out there on the subject (of course mainly in Italian when dealing with the linguistic history and politics of language in southern Italy) as well as problems of linguistic diversity and language acquisition in the US Italian diaspora. Summaries I've read from historians on the subject of language in US Italian communities among the first generation settlers of the peak period of Italian migration to America (1890s-1920) was that as many as 70% of these settlers were illiterate and most had little to no facility in standard Italian, which serves to underscore the real challenges that linguistic diversity had for the formation of Italian American communities. While there may be examples of mafiosi who were likely somewhat better traveled or cosmopolitan than typical contadini immigrants (and this is not at all to say that all migrants had been isolated in villages prior to migration, though it certainly was the case that many were), this is an interesting question in and of itself and (of course) these guys were likely not representative of the overall population that formed the first generation of Italian American communities.

Another issue is what we mean by "dialetto", which today is often conflated I think with "vernacolo", as a set of local phonological idiosyncracies and
idiomatic usages that color regional variants of standard Italian (so much more like the example above of Southern vs NYC American English) vs. what some refer to as "dialetto stretto", the old-style "pure" regional languages that in many provinces are rapidly dying off. Since the period of the World Wars standard Italian has increasingly displaced local languages of course, which are often strongly marked or stigmatized as archaic, lower class and "peasant". Not only that, but local languages have also absorbed a significant amount of influence (in syntax and lexicon) from standard Italian over the decades, so what people speak as Sicilian today can't be taken at face value as representative of what Sicilian sounded like 120 years ago (to say the least). It has clearly changed a lot.

And one can easily find many, many accounts from people attesting that even today standard Italian speakers from northern and central Italy have very significant problems understand actual Sicilianu. For example, I've read and have been told by standard Italian speakers from the north that they have a much easier time understanding spoken Spanish than spoken Sicilianu (again, not the local Sicilian standard Italian). And we have plenty of reason to assume that mutual intelligibility would've been even lower 120 years ago. Plenty of evidence that even people speaking different dialects of the same regional language had a lot of difficulty communicating with each other (e.g. people In Basilicata or Campania not understanding the local dialect of a village 30km away). And this is not taking into account people from the actual north (though of course, they figure little in the history of the American Mafia). While standard Italian, Toscano, etc are all at least part of the same Italo-Dalmatian language family as Napuletano and Siclianu, the languages of the north are classified in separate language families (Gallo-Italic, Veneto, and Rhaeto-Romance in the case of Friulia). Even today without recourse to standard Italian as a mediator, my understanding is that there would be extremely low mutual intelligibility between someone speaking one of these languages and another regional language. American English does not provide anything like a useful model for analogy to compare to linguistic diversity in Italy. Again, the better parallel is the case of the languages of the Iberian peninsula, but even then that is most apt for the differences between central and Southern Italian languages (all at least part of the same family), not those of the north.

by **PolackTony** » Mon Jul 06, 2020 12:16 pm

B. wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 12:56 pm
Philly d wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 9:20 am Sicilian to standard Italian is not the same as Southern English to NY English. Those are just different accents they aren't different dialects. And many people consider Siciliano to a separate language. Yes, it's a romance language so there are similiarties.
That's a good point, but we can see where the difference in certain words and phrasing in the Southern US are comparable to Sicilian-Italian vs. Standard Italian. Someone not familiar with the way colloquial English is spoken in the Southern US might be able to understand someone on one of the coasts but have no idea what someone in the South is saying and not only because of the accent, but because of the way words and phrasing are "corrupted" (no insult to the South there).

Someone born and raised in the US, or who has lived here long enough, is going to be able to understand someone in any part of the country enough to get by, but I don't know how well I would do in certain parts of Louisiana for example. No doubt the same is true for Sicilians vs. mainland Italians, where they would understand each other but certain words and phrasing might throw them off if they hadn't experienced it before.

--

This ties into my Mafia Bible, the Magaddino tapes, yet again. In a taped conversation between Magaddino and John Cammalleri they talk about how certain LE agents they've interacted with are trained in standard Italian but they (the mafiosi) have a difficult time understanding them, as they speak a different dialect (Sicilian). I am sure they could understand the agents and they may have been exaggerating the difficulty because it was LE agents trying to speak Italian to them, which of course they wouldn't like.

And to prove the point about different Italian ethnicities understanding each other, there are transcripts of conversations between Magaddino and Calabrians like Dominick Romeo and Dominick D'Agostino where they have long, fluent conversations in Italian or Sicilian dialect and understand each other despite their different ethnic heritage.

On one tape Magaddino implies that his brother taught Willie Moretti how to speak Italian. That's an interesting thought -- an Americanized Calabrian learning Italian via a Sicilian.

Interesting examples. One thing to keep in mind is that where people may have come from in Calabria would'be made a difference. If they were from Cosenza, Cosentino is considered a regional dialect of Napuletano. Anywhere farther south in Calabria, the local dialects were variants of Sicilianu (similar pattern in Northern/Central Puglia vs Salento). Having said that, of course, southern Italian languages are really on a dialect continuum of mutual intelligibility, so even speakers of Cosentino and Sicilians would've had much more facility in communicating than with say someone from Rome or Toscana, let alone Lombardia (without resource to standard Italian as a shared medium of exchange of course).

by **Philly d** » Sun Jul 05, 2020 8:49 pm

B. wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 12:56 pm
Philly d wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 9:20 am Sicilian to standard Italian is not the same as Southern English to NY English. Those are just different accents they aren't different dialects. And many people consider Siciliano to a separate language. Yes, it's a romance language so there are similiarties.
That's a good point, but we can see where the difference in certain words and phrasing in the Southern US are comparable to Sicilian-Italian vs. Standard Italian. Someone not familiar with the way colloquial English is spoken in the Southern US might be able to understand someone on one of the coasts but have no idea what someone in the South is saying and not only because of the accent, but because of the way words and phrasing are "corrupted" (no insult to the South there).

Someone born and raised in the US, or who has lived here long enough, is going to be able to understand someone in any part of the country enough to get by, but I don't know how well I would do in certain parts of Louisiana for example. No doubt the same is true for Sicilians vs. mainland Italians, where they would understand each other but certain words and phrasing might throw them off if they hadn't experienced it before.

--

This ties into my Mafia Bible, the Magaddino tapes, yet again. In a taped conversation between Magaddino and John Cammalleri they talk about how certain LE agents they've interacted with are trained in standard Italian but they (the mafiosi) have a difficult time understanding them, as they speak a different dialect (Sicilian). I am sure they could understand the agents and they may have been exaggerating the difficulty because it was LE agents trying to speak Italian to them, which of course they wouldn't like.

And to prove the point about different Italian ethnicities understanding each other, there are transcripts of conversations between Magaddino and Calabrians like Dominick Romeo and Dominick D'Agostino where they have long, fluent conversations in Italian or Sicilian dialect and understand each other despite their different ethnic heritage.

On one tape Magaddino implies that his brother taught Willie Moretti how to speak Italian. That's an interesting thought -- an Americanized Calabrian learning Italian via a Sicilian.

I am born and raised in NYC and have been to Louisiana 3 times and had no problems. And yes I was deep into cajun country

by **Angelo Santino** » Sun Jul 05, 2020 5:55 pm

Are there any other Italian speakers on the board? Maybe they can listen to the two youtube examples I provided and give their own opinion? All I can do is provide my own which I already did. I can understand everybody, and from my own research, members of organized crime from various provinces never had a problem either a century prior. If this is this much of a contention perhaps I need to focus more on it in the book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_dw8I169go
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEEPyE-nR58

by B. » Sun Jul 05, 2020 12:56 pm

Philly d wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 9:20 am Sicilian to standard Italian is not the same as Southern English to NY English. Those are just different accents they aren't different dialects. And many people consider Siciliano to a separate language. Yes, it's a romance language so there are similiarties.

That's a good point, but we can see where the difference in certain words and phrasing in the Southern US are comparable to Sicilian-Italian vs. Standard Italian. Someone not familiar with the way colloquial English is spoken in the Southern US might be able to understand someone on one of the coasts but have no idea what someone in the South is saying and not only because of the accent, but because of the way words and phrasing are "corrupted" (no insult to the South there).

Someone born and raised in the US, or who has lived here long enough, is going to be able to understand someone in any part of the country enough to get by, but I don't know how well I would do in certain parts of Louisiana for example. No doubt the same is true for Sicilians vs. mainland Italians, where they would understand each other but certain words and phrasing might throw them off if they hadn't experienced it before.

--

This ties into my Mafia Bible, the Magaddino tapes, yet again. In a taped conversation between Magaddino and John Cammalleri they talk about how certain LE agents they've interacted with are trained in standard Italian but they (the mafiosi) have a difficult time understanding them, as they speak a different dialect (Sicilian). I am sure they could understand the agents and they may have been exaggerating the difficulty because it was LE agents trying to speak Italian to them, which of course they wouldn't like.

And to prove the point about different Italian ethnicities understanding each other, there are transcripts of conversations between Magaddino and Calabrians like Dominick Romeo and Dominick D'Agostino where they have long, fluent conversations in Italian or Sicilian dialect and understand each other despite their different ethnic heritage.

On one tape Magaddino implies that his brother taught Willie Moretti how to speak Italian. That's an interesting thought -- an Americanized Calabrian learning Italian via a Sicilian.

by **PolackTony** » Sun Jul 05, 2020 11:29 am

Chris Christie wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 11:25 am
PolackTony wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 11:01 am
Chris Christie wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 10:00 am Italian vs Sicilian language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_dw8I169go

The above could be argued to be a modern version of Sicilian, perhaps older versions had more derivations and I'm not that old.

I've got prisoner files from the 1900's that contain when prisoners were reprimanded, one main reason was for talking to other prisoners. In 1900, there's no indication that Italians from different regions- Lombardy, Naples, Calabria and Sicily couldn't understand each other. Some Sicilians were reprimanded for speaking Greek with Grecian inmates. All I'm saying is, there's no documentation for Italians having a language barrier among each other in the early days of immigration, which lead to a more pragmatic relationship than people might expect after reading about the violent short tempered Mustache Petes that Luciano had removed.

Here's an audio example of all the regional Italian dialects or at least the major ones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEEPyE-nR58
But were they able to communicate without issues because they all learned standard Italian at some point well enough for it to function as a lingua franca? I have a hard time believing that uneducated contadini from Sicily and say Veneto were speaking to each other using Veneto and Sicilianu. Most likely they acquired some facility with standard Italian (either because they had some level of education in Italy, or if not via exposure during migration).

One of the sources of confusion I think is that today some people may confuse people in Sicily or Campania speaking standard Italian with a local accent and some local lexical items and think that this is "dialect". Actual Napuletano and Sicilianu are distinct languages both from each other and from standard Italian. The differences are (objectively) substantially greater than those between regional varieties of American English. Again, the differences are on par with the distance between Spanish and Portuguese. Distinct languages but all part of the same subfamily of the Romance languages (Italo-Dalmation).
Who says they were uneducated? Sicilians were actually more educated than some Italians from other regions, especially some mafiosi who came from privileged backgrounds. If Sicilians lived in Palermo, they'd remember it as a southern resort for Europeans looking for a native environment. Anyone who has studied the Sicilian Mafia knows that foreigners hired them to watch over their property. They were likely exposed to several different languages beyond Sicilian/Italian.

And for those who weren't educated and were maybe criminals in Italy, if they served time they would have been sent to a penal colony filled with Italians from all different regions. Salvatore Sabella served time in Northern Italy before coming to the US. Sicily was not as closed off as people believe. Palermo was a metropolis, Corleone, Sciacca were major cities, not rural towns by 1900.

All good points! I think that it does of course further underscore that when people from different regions were communicating with each other it would've been in Standard Italian (likely inflected with localisms of course).

by **Angelo Santino** » Sun Jul 05, 2020 11:25 am

PolackTony wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 11:01 am
Chris Christie wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 10:00 am Italian vs Sicilian language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_dw8I169go

The above could be argued to be a modern version of Sicilian, perhaps older versions had more derivations and I'm not that old.

I've got prisoner files from the 1900's that contain when prisoners were reprimanded, one main reason was for talking to other prisoners. In 1900, there's no indication that Italians from different regions- Lombardy, Naples, Calabria and Sicily couldn't understand each other. Some Sicilians were reprimanded for speaking Greek with Grecian inmates. All I'm saying is, there's no documentation for Italians having a language barrier among each other in the early days of immigration, which lead to a more pragmatic relationship than people might expect after reading about the violent short tempered Mustache Petes that Luciano had removed.

Here's an audio example of all the regional Italian dialects or at least the major ones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEEPyE-nR58
But were they able to communicate without issues because they all learned standard Italian at some point well enough for it to function as a lingua franca? I have a hard time believing that uneducated contadini from Sicily and say Veneto were speaking to each other using Veneto and Sicilianu. Most likely they acquired some facility with standard Italian (either because they had some level of education in Italy, or if not via exposure during migration).

One of the sources of confusion I think is that today some people may confuse people in Sicily or Campania speaking standard Italian with a local accent and some local lexical items and think that this is "dialect". Actual Napuletano and Sicilianu are distinct languages both from each other and from standard Italian. The differences are (objectively) substantially greater than those between regional varieties of American English. Again, the differences are on par with the distance between Spanish and Portuguese. Distinct languages but all part of the same subfamily of the Romance languages (Italo-Dalmation).

Who says they were uneducated? Sicilians were actually more educated than some Italians from other regions, especially some mafiosi who came from privileged backgrounds. If Sicilians lived in Palermo, they'd remember it as a southern resort for Europeans looking for a native environment. Anyone who has studied the Sicilian Mafia knows that foreigners hired them to watch over their property. They were likely exposed to several different languages beyond Sicilian/Italian.

And for those who weren't educated and were maybe criminals in Italy, if they served time they would have been sent to a penal colony filled with Italians from all different regions. Salvatore Sabella served time in Northern Italy before coming to the US. Sicily was not as closed off as people believe. Palermo was a metropolis, Corleone, Sciacca were major cities, not rural towns by 1900.

by **PolackTony** » Sun Jul 05, 2020 11:01 am

Chris Christie wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 10:00 am Italian vs Sicilian language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_dw8I169go

The above could be argued to be a modern version of Sicilian, perhaps older versions had more derivations and I'm not that old.

I've got prisoner files from the 1900's that contain when prisoners were reprimanded, one main reason was for talking to other prisoners. In 1900, there's no indication that Italians from different regions- Lombardy, Naples, Calabria and Sicily couldn't understand each other. Some Sicilians were reprimanded for speaking Greek with Grecian inmates. All I'm saying is, there's no documentation for Italians having a language barrier among each other in the early days of immigration, which lead to a more pragmatic relationship than people might expect after reading about the violent short tempered Mustache Petes that Luciano had removed.

Here's an audio example of all the regional Italian dialects or at least the major ones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEEPyE-nR58

But were they able to communicate without issues because they all learned standard Italian at some point well enough for it to function as a lingua franca? I have a hard time believing that uneducated contadini from Sicily and say Veneto were speaking to each other using Veneto and Sicilianu. Most likely they acquired some facility with standard Italian (either because they had some level of education in Italy, or if not via exposure during migration).

One of the sources of confusion I think is that today some people may confuse people in Sicily or Campania speaking standard Italian with a local accent and some local lexical items and think that this is "dialect". Actual Napuletano and Sicilianu are distinct languages both from each other and from standard Italian. The differences are (objectively) substantially greater than those between regional varieties of American English. Again, the differences are on par with the distance between Spanish and Portuguese. Distinct languages but all part of the same subfamily of the Romance languages (Italo-Dalmation).

by **Angelo Santino** » Sun Jul 05, 2020 10:00 am

Italian vs Sicilian language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_dw8I169go

The above could be argued to be a modern version of Sicilian, perhaps older versions had more derivations and I'm not that old.

I've got prisoner files from the 1900's that contain when prisoners were reprimanded, one main reason was for talking to other prisoners. In 1900, there's no indication that Italians from different regions- Lombardy, Naples, Calabria and Sicily couldn't understand each other. Some Sicilians were reprimanded for speaking Greek with Grecian inmates. All I'm saying is, there's no documentation for Italians having a language barrier among each other in the early days of immigration, which lead to a more pragmatic relationship than people might expect after reading about the violent short tempered Mustache Petes that Luciano had removed.

Here's an audio example of all the regional Italian dialects or at least the major ones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEEPyE-nR58

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