"Italglish" (like Spanglish)

jdespres at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM jdespres at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM
Fri Mar 9 17:52:37 UTC 2001


The influences (albeit transitory) of my grandparents' Italian on the
impressionable younger generation could be pretty amusing, too.
One of my cousins who spent a lot of time being watched by my
grandparents was sometimes heard saying "I want a cuppacake!"  I
apparently picked up one of my grandmother's expressions of
exasperation ("be!"), along with the piteously distressed tone of
voice she used when intoning it, as a toddler.  And, come to think
of it, one of my aunts still pronounces the word sandwich
"sangwich," a slight simplification of my grandmother's
"sangweechu."  Is there a linguistic term for this phenomenon?

Joanne the English major



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