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Italian for Italian Americans: what your family actually spoke

You are not starting from zero. You are starting from a hundred words nobody ever wrote down for you.

The words you already have

Almost every Italian-American family keeps a small vocabulary: food, insults, blessings, the phrase your grandmother said when you left the house. You can produce them and you cannot spell them, because nobody ever showed you the written form. Some of them are not standard Italian at all.

That is not a gap in your education. It is an accurate record of what your family brought over, and the first thing worth doing is to find out what it was.

Why the textbook does not match your memory

Between roughly 1880 and 1924 the great majority of Italian emigration to the United States came from the South: Sicily, Campania, Calabria, Abruzzo, Basilicata, Puglia. At that time standard Italian was a written language that most Italians did not speak at home. What people spoke were regional languages (Sicilian, Neapolitan and the rest), related to Italian, not versions of it.

So your great-grandfather did not speak “bad Italian”. He spoke a different language, fluently. Standard Italian spread through Italy mainly after the Second World War, with schooling and television: decades after he had already left.

This is why gabagool, mutzarell and ricott sound nothing like capocollo, mozzarella and ricotta. Dropping the final vowel is a Southern feature, not a mistake. See dialects and standard Italian.

What to learn, and in which order

Standard Italian first. It is what is taught, what is written, what is spoken in Italy today, and what the relatives you find will use with a foreigner.
Then the regional layer. Once you have standard Italian, the family words stop being random noise and start being recognisably Sicilian or Neapolitan.
Reading early. Literature is where the world your family left is still described. Start with Verga for Sicily, Serao for Naples.

If there is a practical reason too

Many people arrive at Italian through paperwork: records, a comune, a citizenship file. Two pages here are built for that: Italian for genealogy research and Italian for a trip to your family’s town.

If an exam is involved, see CILS, CELI or PLIDA and reading practice for the exams.