New York surnames

[PolackTony]

Italy was only unified in the 1850's. When Italos arrived in the 1870's to 1900's they fully became one unified demographic gradually. The San Gennaro festival was a regional holiday that came to be embraced by all NY Itals. On average, from research on the subject, it took dialect Italians an average of 3 years to learns formal Italian and 7 more years to speak English as a first.

But even so, Sicilians and Italians could converse with each other the same way a redneck from Alabama can talk to a New Yorker from Brooklyn. The Soda is called pop and grease is reused and maybe they never heard of capicola or grits but they can understand each other. Dialect is not so different that it's Chinese and Englishmen trying to build a fort. If anything the difference is more cultural.

One point though. While your reference to research on language acquisition is useful, what people call Italian "dialects" are very much more distinct from each other than even the most divergent of regional variants of accents of American English. While they are nowhere near as different than the extreme analogy of English and Chinese, some of them are as different as Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan are from each other, and linguists consider both Napuletano and Sicilianu to be distinct (though related) languages from standard Italian. Sicilianu in particular has significant grammatical differences with standard Italian and plenty of mainland native standard Italian speakers have real difficulties in understanding spoken Sicilianu. I'm sure you know this already, and I'm not stating it to be pedantic, but it's not the same thing as a guy from Texas talking to a guy from BK.

[Angelo Santino]

Italy was only unified in the 1850's. When Italos arrived in the 1870's to 1900's they fully became one unified demographic gradually. The San Gennaro festival was a regional holiday that came to be embraced by all NY Itals. On average, from research on the subject, it took dialect Italians an average of 3 years to learns formal Italian and 7 more years to speak English as a first.

But even so, Sicilians and Italians could converse with each other the same way a redneck from Alabama can talk to a New Yorker from Brooklyn. The Soda is called pop and grease is reused and maybe they never heard of capicola or grits but they can understand each other. Dialect is not so different that it's Chinese and Englishmen trying to build a fort. If anything the difference is more cultural.

One point though. While your reference to research on language acquisition is useful, what people call Italian "dialects" are very much more distinct from each other than even the most divergent of regional variants of accents of American English. While they are nowhere near as different than the extreme analogy of English and Chinese, some of them are as different as Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan are from each other, and linguists consider both Napuletano and Sicilianu to be distinct (though related) languages from standard Italian. Sicilianu in particular has significant grammatical differences with standard Italian and plenty of mainland native standard Italian speakers have real difficulties in understanding spoken Sicilianu. I'm sure you know this already, and I'm not stating it to be pedantic, but it's not the same thing as a guy from Texas talking to a guy from BK.

These dialects were all derivations of the same language, a group of individuals from Trieste, Naples, Reggio, Bari, Messina and Trapani would be able to have a conversation. The dialect is represented in how certain words are pronounced and certain meanings of things. Would a New Yorker be dumbfounded if a southerner walked in and asked: "Do y'all got any call-fee?" If a Sicilian were to say "salutamu" the northerner would understand the meaning despite it being a new term to him. It'd be like a New Yorker hearing "Howdy" for the first time. The dialect was rather a stamp of where someone came from more so than it was a hindrance in communication.

[B.]

Despite this subject of the Mafia which is heavily laced in Italian culture, Italians strived to be Americans. This is noted in Joe B's autobio who considered his citizenship one of the proudest days of his life. Clemente as early as 1910 went by Clement and married an American woman (which prevented kidnap victims from being stashed at his place otherwise he'd be cool with it.) Looking at death certificates and the coroners reports, more than a few guys had tattoos of Italian and American flags on their backs and torsos in the 1920's.

So the melting pot is very much a factor. My entire thesis on compaesanismo and regional affiliations exist, but its like sand blowing in a storm if that makes sense. And after 2-3 generations, some of these guys may not be aware of it. Gravano of Porto Empedoclini descent may not have realize he was being made in a primary Agrigentese faction within the Gambinos, if I get the chance to ask him he may very well disregard it as coincidence or me as a mafia nerd seeing things that are not there. But I'd argue "birds of a feather" is still very much a factor, at least up until his era.

We have Americanized CWs and CIs, some not even of Sicilian heritage, who have said that the officiant "spoke in Sicilian" during their induction ceremony or in other meetings. I've wondered if they just assumed it was Sicilian dialect or if they were actually able to recognize the nuances of "Sicilian" vs. "Italian". In one case, it was a non-Sicilian officiant who they said "spoke Sicilian", which makes me question that description. The recorded 1989 Boston ceremony was officiated by Sicilian "zip" Biagio DiGiacomo and I'm sure this was done because of his command of the language, maybe even his traditional Sicilian mafia ties.

It's telling when high-level CWs describe the Sicilian "zips" as being "from Italy" or simply as "the Italians". Gravano referred to Nino Inzerillo as part of "the Italian mob" (Sicilian mafia) and Massino, Vitale, and Frank Lino referred to the Bonanno "zip" faction as "Italian". No doubt they were aware these guys were Sicilians, but you can tell it wasn't much of a distinction to them -- what was important to them is these men were not born in America. Frank Lino called Santo Giordano "Tony" and described him as an "Italian"; probably had no idea his nickname was spelled "Toni", a diminutive of the last syllable in "Santo". That's an interesting cultural difference too -- how Italian nicknames are derived mostly from the last syllable of the name, not the first (i.e. Salvatore "Toto/Tore", Nicola "Cola", and so on).

When Sal Vitale drove Cesare Bonventre to his death, I doubt it even crossed his mind that he was murdering a fellow paesano of Castellammarese heritage, as Vitale's Sicilian heritage meant nothing when he was recruited by Massino. Bonventre on the other hand formed close relationships with his fellow Castellammarese, even those who were American-born like Carmine Galante and Vincent Asaro -- the difference is Galante and Asaro were from a Castellammarese mafia tradition and unlike Vitale this played a fundamental role in their recruitment.

For example, Gary Valenti testified that Vincent Asaro formed a close relationship to Bonventre and Baldo Amato, to the point where they even secretly allied against boss Rastelli in a dispute and deliberately spoke Sicilian in a sitdown so that Rastelli couldn't understand them (a significant insult to Rastelli). It's not a coincidence that Vincent Asaro's great-grandfather was a mafioso in Castellammare (who participated in a murder with a Buccellato) and that Asaro has Bonventres in his family tree, including two in his modern day crew. I'm sure Vitale had some common mafia surnames in his background (Vitale being one itself), but he didn't come from a mafia pedigree and gained access to the mafia from the mainland-American Massino.

--

Looking at Gravano, it was more circumstance that he fell in with the Brooklyn faction of the Gambino family, which had a long history with Agrigento province and specifically Gravano's paternal hometown of Porto Empedocle, but I don't think it can be ignored. His father was a legitimate businessman but was nonetheless on record with the mysterious "Zu Vito", who Gravano implies was a compaesano (i.e. "Zu Vito" was almost surely from Porto Empedocle or a nearby village and likely a Gambino member). Gravano implies himself that Gerlando Gravano's relationship to "Zu Vito" was based on this shared hometown and that's only one generation ahead of Sammy.

We know heritage had nothing to do with Gravano's association with the Persico crew, but when they placed him with the Aurello crew to save his life I have to wonder if there were any finer details to the situation. In that neighborhood, the Gambino family was basically the only other show in town and those neighborhoods had a strong historic Agrigentini community that would have trickled down to later generations, but it stands that the Colombo family had virtually no Agrigentini membership and it appears even among the later generations of Americanized Agrigentini that most of them fell in with the Gambino family.

Gravano's wife's family the Scibettas also appear to have come from Agrigento province, though I haven't been able to completely confirm it (note that the Buffalo/Canada Scibettas were also Agrigentini). This wasn't an arranged marriage and his description of their meeting in his book makes it out to be random -- he met her through friends and eventually convinced her to date. If Gravano was born 40 years earlier and we looked at the records, we would say "Of course he married a fellow Agrigentino" and back then it probably would have been deliberate. Decades later we have the same result and it was probably a coincidence based on the fact that Bensonhurst had a high population of Agrigentini that filtered through the same social circles, i.e. "birds of a feather".

It was probably insignificant to Gravano where his wife was from and where he fit into the Gambino family's historic factions, but if it's true Debbie Scibetta's family was from Agrigento, then we have a Gravano from Porto Empedocle marrying a woman from his province and joining a family with a strong Agrigentini foundation. The grooves were well-worn and if nothing else he fell into one of those grooves based on circumstance.

Gravano also had more important matters to talk about than the murky Sicilian connections that predated him. He was one of the most successful construction racketeers in mafia history and was John Gotti's confidant and underboss. He committed nineteen murders, including the Castellano murder. It's not hard to understand why he may not have been thinking about Agrigento, or if he was aware of that connection, it's no surprise it was a minor footnote. At the very least he understood that his father could go to his Porto Empedocle paesano "Zu Vito" for mafia protection.

--

It's similar to Valachi, who in his senate testimony says that one of the reasons he transferred away from the Luccheses and Bonannos into the Genovese family is because the Sicilians still highly preferred their own and he ran into problems with them as a result. In his book he completely glosses over this and makes it sound like he transferred to the Genovese family on a random recommendation because of Maranzano's death, but the testimony implies the decision had more to do with his heritage conflicting with the Sicilian-dominated families, whereas his Neapolitan background and "schooling" fit with the Genovese family.

When we look at who "schooled" him and who proposed him for membership (Alessandro Vollero and Dominick Petrelli, respectively) as well as some of his early friends, it's clear that his trajectory was not simply a coincidence or an arbitrary decision. The thing is, you have to compare his senate testimony, the "Real Thing", and his book, plus the glimpses we have of his FBI interviews, to get the bigger picture and even then we probably would have learned even more if we had been able to ask him more pointed questions.

It's sort of like DiLeonardo, where his testimony makes a brief mention of his grandfather and Salvatore D'Aquila, but through specific questions, interviews, as well as our own research (i.e. Jimmy DiLeonardo's 1909 letter to Cascio Ferro) we have learned he and his crew, plus crews like the Trainas, understood where they fit into mafia history. Of course that had little bearing on his testimony against the Gotti regime and the press was going to focus 100% on that when he flipped, but the connections were there and Michael vividly understands them to this day.

The same may not be true for Gravano and if he were to read what I've written he might think I'm a freak for making these connections, but the groove was there and he fit perfectly into it.

Do you get the impression that some of them "slur" through it because they're not really sure how to say it? It's not their fault, their exposure to Italian was likely limited to oral/audio through family with little to no written/writing practice. They are repeating words that they heard and it becomes Chinese Whispers. Not to mention they're in the Mafia, not cultural representatives.

This is definitely true. Some of those early FBI interviews with CIs can be telling, where they clearly struggled to explain to the FBI what word they were trying to use. Granted some of them bordered on illiteracy so they couldn't spell it out, but even verbally it seems like they struggled to map out the syllables they were saying. The Detroit informant who reported that the boss is "ugob" (il capo) and underboss the "zottogob"(sottocapo) is an example. We understand perfectly what he was saying, but if someone had no concept of dialect and phonetic pronunciations, they would think this was gibberish and the informant may not be able to convert it to proper Italian. Interestingly he said the "zottogob" was the "assistant boss", which is a good way of understanding the traditional underboss role.

I'm reminded of the scene from Analyze This where Billy Crystal pronounces consigliere with a hard G and separates every syllable. This is exactly how a non-Italian would intuitively pronounce it, which draws suspicion from everyone at the meeting. Americanized mafia members wouldn't expect someone to perfectly pronounce every Italian word, but they are going to raise an eyebrow if someone on the street pronounces something like an outsider who read it in a book. On the other hand, if a mafia member slurs some Brooklynese pronunciation of an Italian word it is par for the course with Americanized members in a subculture where everything is verbal and most members are relatively uneducated. It's not about being "proper" or "right, it's about fitting in with the subculture.

I like your Southern US vs. East Coast NYC example. If you were at a diner in rural Kentucky trying to fit in and you said "aren't" instead of "ain't", you're probably going to out yourself as an outsider even though "ain't" is a dialectic corruption of "aren't" and means the same exact thing. They would understand what you're saying but you would out yourself. It's like if you went to 18th avenue and said, "Hey, Zio Pinuzzo!" instead of "Ayyy, Zu Binuzz!" They're not going to kill you for it, but they're going to know instantly that you're an outsider (and in my case, Scandinavian-American DNA would out me before I could open my mouth).

--

It's incredible to me that the modern Colombo member was arrested with a copy of John Dickie's book. That's not just a pop culture overview of modern NYC mafia history like Raab's "Five Families", but a thorough look into what the mafia actually is at its core. It might sound ridiculous, but I believe a modern Colombo member could learn more about the mafia tradition from John Dickie, a Brit, than from the Persicos.

However, if he wants to understand shrewd New York mafia politics and cutthroat racketeering from people who intuitively understand it, the Persicos could show him more in one sitdown than he could ever learn from Dickie's book and it is members like the Persicos who keep the tradition alive, not the historians. The Persicos aren't bosses because they can tell you about the Villabatesi clan that dominated their family in the 1930s, the role of the Consiglio Supremo and National Assembly in 1910, or what the preferred pronoun was for the "capo dei capi" a hundred years ago. Maybe Carmine Persico could have told you that Tom DiBella's father had been an early boss given he was close to DiBella, but who knows.

Now, was it a coincidence that this member ended up with Dickie's book? Did he go to Barnes & Noble and just see a book called "Cosa Nostra" and grab it for entertainment, or did he deliberately choose a book that deeply and accurately examines the mafia tradition like Dickie does? Did he have it in his car because he was having study sessions with other mafiosi, or was he just casually reading it at the coffee shop? Is there a rule against a member reading a book called "Cosa Nostra" in public?

If he could actually read that book and think critically about it, he would probably qualify to become the new Colombo consigliere. Imagine this guy in a sitdown -- he'd either school everyone, or they'd just tell him, "Shut up. What do Buscetta and Calderone's description of the 'no lying' rule have to do with the money this guy in Brooklyn owes me?"

--

This all ties in with the thread from the old board about how much these guys actually know/understand about their own history. Michael DiLeonardo's grandfather and great-grandfather were Sicilian-born mafiosi who knew Vito Cascio Ferro and Salvatore D'Aquila. His own sponsor was Toto D'Aquila's nephew and he was schooled by D'Aquila's son. He had an interest in the history and knew people who were there. He hung out with the Traina crew and Joe Arcuri, who bridged a gap between the roots of the family and its modern incarnation.

On the other hand, John Gotti had a portrait of Albert Anastasia on his wall, but his small talk about history probably had more to do with murders, scores, and ball-busting than Anastasia's 1920s Camorra ties or what Calabrian hometown he came from. But what does that mean in 1986? John Gotti became the boss of D'Aquila's old family through his own initiative and will go down in history as one of the most infamous mafia bosses of all time. Like the Persicos, he understood the game even if he didn't care about the traditions and history to the extent that an nth generation Sicilian would. He certainly didn't have to pronounce words "right" to become a mafia boss.

[Angelo Santino]

That is a Little Joe Shots length post! All good points, I agree with everything.

Looking at Gravano, it was more circumstance that he fell in with the Brooklyn faction of the Gambino family, which had a long history with Agrigento province and specifically Gravano's paternal hometown of Porto Empedocle, but I don't think it can be ignored. His father was a legitimate businessman but was nonetheless on record with the mysterious "Zu Vito", who Gravano implies was a compaesano (i.e. "Zu Vito" was almost surely from Porto Empedocle or a nearby village and likely a Gambino member). Gravano implies himself that Gerlando Gravano's relationship to "Zu Vito" was based on this shared hometown and that's only one generation ahead of Sammy.

We know heritage had nothing to do with Gravano's association with the Persico crew, but when they placed him with the Aurello crew to save his life I have to wonder if there were any finer details to the situation. In that neighborhood, the Gambino family was basically the only other show in town and those neighborhoods had a strong historic Agrigentini community that would have trickled down to later generations, but it stands that the Colombo family had virtually no Agrigentini membership and it appears even among the later generations of Americanized Agrigentini that most of them fell in with the Gambino family.

Gravano's wife's family the Scibettas also appear to have come from Agrigento province, though I haven't been able to completely confirm it (note that the Buffalo/Canada Scibettas were also Agrigentini). This wasn't an arranged marriage and his description of their meeting in his book makes it out to be random -- he met her through friends and eventually convinced her to date. If Gravano was born 40 years earlier and we looked at the records, we would say "Of course he married a fellow Agrigentino" and back then it probably would have been deliberate. Decades later we have the same result and it was probably a coincidence based on the fact that Bensonhurst had a high population of Agrigentini that filtered through the same social circles, i.e. "birds of a feather".

It was probably insignificant to Gravano where his wife was from and where he fit into the Gambino family's historic factions, but if it's true Debbie Scibetta's family was from Agrigento, then we have a Gravano from Porto Empedocle marrying a woman from his province and joining a family with a strong Agrigentini foundation. The grooves were well-worn and if nothing else he fell into one of those grooves based on circumstance.

Gravano also had more important matters to talk about than the murky Sicilian connections that predated him. He was one of the most successful construction racketeers in mafia history and was John Gotti's confidant and underboss. He committed nineteen murders, including the Castellano murder. It's not hard to understand why he may not have been thinking about Agrigento, or if he was aware of that connection, it's no surprise it was a minor footnote. At the very least he understood that his father could go to his Porto Empedocle paesano "Zu Vito" for mafia protection.

If I get the opportunity I intend on asking him exactly this. And yeah, I agree, it would be like explaining Newton's Law of Motion to Michael Jordon who just played the game. I think its right in front of them that they're not even aware of it, this applies to Gentile too. It's like speaking a language, many just know how to and do it fluently, but they cannot explain it academically and would likely find it a nuance.

This is definitely true. Some of those early FBI interviews with CIs can be telling, where they clearly struggled to explain to the FBI what word they were trying to use. Granted some of them bordered on illiteracy so they couldn't spell it out, but even verbally it seems like they struggled to map out the syllables they were saying. The Detroit informant who reported that the boss is "ugob" (il capo) and underboss the "zottogob"(sottocapo) is an example. We understand perfectly what he was saying, but if someone had no concept of dialect and phonetic pronunciations, they would think this was gibberish and the informant may not be able to convert it to proper Italian. Interestingly he said the "zottogob" was the "assistant boss", which is a good way of understanding the traditional underboss role.

I'm reminded of the scene from Analyze This where Billy Crystal pronounces consigliere with a hard G and separates every syllable. This is exactly how a non-Italian would intuitively pronounce it, which draws suspicion from everyone at the meeting. Americanized mafia members wouldn't expect someone to perfectly pronounce every Italian word, but they are going to raise an eyebrow if someone on the street pronounces something like an outsider who read it in a book. On the other hand, if a mafia member slurs some Brooklynese pronunciation of an Italian word it is par for the course with Americanized members in a subculture where everything is verbal and most members are relatively uneducated. It's not about being "proper" or "right, it's about fitting in with the subculture.

When jumping to Italian words within English sentences, I've Americanized certain words/terms for speed and flow purposes. Unless you're speaking English with a strong Italian accent it does slow you down to jump from one language and pronunciation rules to another with different grammar, vowel sounds everything. Older relatives in my family who spent 25+ years speaking Ital are going to have that accent and when they talk fast (zip) its English with an accent so they say Italian words with ease. At this point in my life I've spoken English more than any other language, I'll use capos so everyone knows what I'm talking about rather than explain capi, I'll say "Jenno-vase" rather than Jay-no-vay-see. As for Consigliere itself, Gawn-sieg-lear I think I say it, but I'll also say Consig for short. It's also a factor that, Sicilianismo aside, I didn't grow up in a mob environment and instead encountered these phrases through books and later research.

I like your Southern US vs. East Coast NYC example. If you were at a diner in rural Kentucky trying to fit in and you said "aren't" instead of "ain't", you're probably going to out yourself as an outsider even though "ain't" is a dialectic corruption of "aren't" and means the same exact thing. They would understand what you're saying but you would out yourself. It's like if you went to 18th avenue and said, "Hey, Zio Pinuzzo!" instead of "Ayyy, Zu Binuzz!" They're not going to kill you for it, but they're going to know instantly that you're an outsider (and in my case, Scandinavian-American DNA would out me before I could open my mouth).

And when Americans hear a tangy southern accent or a boisterous east coast accent or west coast etc it carries connotations of what people have preconceived about the region. The southerner fucks Chickens, the east coaster is an asshole and the west coaster a hippie. But I would argue the majority of society is pragmatic and most people would have no problem traveling. You'll encounter assholes everywhere, a southerner could walk into the wrong place in Brooklyn and have 5 guys attack him dressed in track suits with thick accents and a NYer could meet an Emmet Till situation in the south, but it would hardly be common or even a passing risk. Italians were really no different with each other. Bonanno goes into it, other sources I have do too. Social societies, clubs, block parties. I think the whole regional thing is overstated because we take things like this literal. If I were a member recorded saying "B.'s on the west coast, he probably smokes marijuana and hugs trees." This would be documented as showcasing my "deep resentment of west coast Americans" when I probably didn't think twice about it.

[Philly d]

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.

[Angelo Santino]

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

[PolackTony]

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).

[Angelo Santino]

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.

[PolackTony]

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).

[B.]

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.

[Angelo Santino]

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

[Philly d]

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

[PolackTony]

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).

[PolackTony]

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.

[Angelo Santino]

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