L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, MARCH 31, 2016 www.italoamericano.org L'Italo-Americano 2 NEWS & FEATURES TOP STORIES PEOPLE EVENTS I magine migrating to a land you don't know the language of. This is the reality that mil- lions of Italians have faced when they moved to the United States after the unification of Italy, in 1861, and on. "Ticketta" said the Italian man on American soil to refer to tick- et. This is an example that Filomena Fuduli Sorrentino, lan- guage teacher at Newburgh ESCD and adjunct professor at universities, uses when explain- ing me the roots, development and loss of the Italian-American language. With Calabrian blood, Sorrentino moved to Long Island, NY, in 1982 and has been living there ever since. She falls into the category of immigrants, who moved to the States without knowing the language at first. "That was the biggest chal- lenge," she writes. Though, "I had the privilege to be surrounded by family mem- bers who made me feel comfort- able because they spoke Italian," writes Sorrentino. She goes on describing the language barriers that were sometimes present in her own Italian-American family. She is driven to the memory of the oldest of three aunts, when she spoke Italian. "It was a plea- sure to listen to her because her dialect was rich in terms that today are not used anymore by the people in Calabria," Sorrentino writes. She goes on remembering her aunt's children having a hard time holding a conversation in Italian with her. They were born in America and had a limited knowledge of Italian. This is the process that gradu- ally affected most Italian- American families. For survival reasons, the migrating groups started to develop their own mixed language by using words such as "ticketta." Not only with Americans, but also Italians and as a result, they lost their native Italian language and gave life to Pidgin. What is Pidgin? The Italian-American lan- guage is Pidgin, a mixed lan- guage that varies according to the speakers' age, generation, educa- tion, and their social inclusion or neighborhood which they lived and worked in. The code is char- acterized by the influence of English in the lexicon, Italian structure, or regional dialect. Since English is the strongest lan- guage, or 'lessificatrice', the words are created with English roots and Italian suffixes. Normally, the grafting of a con- sonant and vowel are at the end of the English word. Some exam- ples are: Drivare for to drive, splittare for to split, switchare for to switch, mecciare for to match, quittare for to quit, parcare for to park, and many more. These English-Italian coded words helped the two groups to commu- nicate. Is the Italian-American lan- guage still used today? If so, A n e x c u r s u s o n t h e I t a l i a n - A m e r i c a n language with Filomena Sorrentino LAVINIA PISANI Filomena Fuduli Sorrentino, language teacher at Newburgh ESCD Continued to page 3

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