Italian in Little Italy
One of my instructors in Siena talked about her time in New York with me. She mentioned that she had been to Little Italy, and then she chuckled.
"You know," she said, "there are a lot of people in Little Italy who think they can speak Italian. But I never heard anyone actually speaking Italian. Instead, what they spoke was like a stew, with little bits of Italian in it, but also English, and Calabrese, and Sicilian, and Neopolitan, and half-a-dozen other dialects."
"You know," she said, "there are a lot of people in Little Italy who think they can speak Italian. But I never heard anyone actually speaking Italian. Instead, what they spoke was like a stew, with little bits of Italian in it, but also English, and Calabrese, and Sicilian, and Neopolitan, and half-a-dozen other dialects."
Pidgins to the left, creoles to the right...
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