I didn’t notice this post. This is actually quite like the way my friend talks. Sometimes the last syllable may be swallowed, but the sounds spoken reflect the orthography. Naples is quite obviously not Northern Italy, but he may just have some sort of generic/classic Italian accent. My father is a perfect example of this. He’s from Zakopane, Poland, the southern mountainous region of Poland which is well known for having an extremely strong accent, but my father doesn’t have the merest hint of the tell-tale Goralski accent, speaking a more neutral form of Polish.
I think there was much looking down upon in the past, but much less now. When I worked in Italy, I was in Tuscany, and Tuscans consider their language the “language of Dante” and so superior to all other languages (on earth, not just in Italy). The upper class people I worked with wouldn’t react at all to a Sicilian person who spoke that way, but they would be considerably alarmed if their kid came home from school talking like that.
I’m not Italian-American, but I’m from New York so I always thought that the cheese was called matzar’ELL. The Tuscans saw this as a real “hapless American” thing – like “yeah, leave it to the Americans to decide to say mozzarella like a Sicilian for no good reason.” The history of Southern Italian immigration to the US did not count as a good reason. I should add that everyone I worked with was extremely encouraging and upbeat about my attempts to Italian, so they weren’t mean about it, but determined to cheerfully correct me, as if you heard a English-learner say “ain’t.” Keep in mind that, on the other hand, people from Rome were just as anxious to “correct” the Tuscana words I picked up.
Of course, when you are a foreigner and try to speak Italian, even with the Sicilian or Southern influence, they appreciate it, is a sign of respect that you try to learn their language.
I was in a restaurant in Bergamo, near Milano, and a couple of Sicilian or Calabrese guys entered.As they ordered, the other customers looked at them a little funny, maybe arrogant, as in “the poor South trash” came to work in the North.And this is an opinion shared by a lot of Italians that I know.They actually look at Southern Italians like imigrants.
Here are a couple of previous SDMB threads on the topic:
Ever heard the word “gupaleen” for “hat”? (2004)
Pasta fazool! (2005)
I suspect that the most mainstream US example of this phenomenon is parmesan cheese. In my experience, most Americans would say that there is a cheese spelled “p-a-r-m-e-s-a-n” and pronounced “parmezhan”. How did this come about? The letter “s” isn’t usually pronounced “zh” either in English or in Italian.
The Italian word – Parmigiano – would be pronounced with a “zh” (or a “dj”) by most Italians that I’ve talked with, but (at least in the North) there would be a definite final “o”. The French converted it to “Parmesan” with the “s” pronounced as a soft “z”. The French spelling is used in Anglophone countries; in the UK I’ve heard differing hardness of the “s”, but it’s still within the normal range of British “s” sounds.
I imagine that what happened in the US is that Italian Americans (mainly in the Northeast, from Baltimore to Boston) were used to the Italian spelling “Parmigiano”, but when speaking dropped the final vowel (as in the OP), hence “parm-e-zhan”. For whatever reason, this pronunciation also became associated with the (Anglo-)French spelling of “Parmesan”, to produce the anomaly that has become what I would consider to be the US “standard” today.
[Just my WAG, however. Opposing theories welcome!]
It took me years to realise that the American “par-me-ZHAAN” pronunciation actually referred to the word “parmesan”. In British English it is usually pronounced “PAR-me-zan”, to rhyme with “marzipan”.
Never mind the cheese – how about the sandwich? Because even if the cheese is “Parmesan Cheese” in English by way of French, I don’t think this spelling carries over to the chicken or veal heros, which mainly feature mozzarella cheese.
If it’s not a “chicken parmesan” hero (which looks wrong to me), is it parmigiano, parmesano, parmiggiano, parmegian(o), etc.? I’ve seen this (mis)spelled so many different ways I’ve lost count and have no idea what the standard spelling is. I see “parmigiano” and “parmegian” the most often.
It’s always pronounced (AFAIK) “par-mi-zhan” regardless of the signage, though. Or even just “chick parm”.
Years ago, I was traveling out in Nevada with my old boss, formerly from St Albans. At a small restaurant in the back of beyond, he decided he would order chicken parm for himself, and pronounced it as “chicken PAR-me-zan.” The waitress, an older lady, promptly corrected him by saying, "Here we call it ‘chicken par-me-ZHAAN.’ " With a little eye-roll in my direction, he acquiesced to her pronounciation, and she positively beamed. And then she said, “What kind of salad dressing would you like? We have French, Russian, bleu cheese, and EYE-talian.”
The look on his face at that moment was priceless. 
I can attest to Bogdan’s statements about pronunciation in the North. I learned my Italian while an exchange student in Milan and there few syllables are slurred or dropped. In my teens, when I was in school there, my classmates liked to imitate what they considered the cruder accents of the South. The history teacher, who was from Calabria, was not cal-la-BRE-se, but was instead referred to as GAL-bray. There are slurs that northerners use to refer to southerners, but they’re fighting words and I’d prefer not to pass them along.
Linguistically, Sicily doesn’t fit in terribly well with the rest of the peninsula. It was conquered, after all, by Greeks and Moors and Normans. It’s inclusion as a part of the Italian speaking world is a relatively recent phenomenon linguistically speaking. In his wonderful new novel, The Ruby in Her Navel, Barry Unsworth writes of medieval Sicily as a place where Arabic, Greek and local Italian vernacular are spoken in about equal amounts. I suspect extensive influence from other languages is a critical reason that Sicilian is such a beautiful dialect.
Um, yeah - most of it - 
Do you really want to know how these food items are pronounced in Italy today?
There are at least four pronunciations found of Italian:
- standard Italian
- non-standard Italian (i.e. regional variations and dialects)
- Italian-American
- North American (those not of Italian origin)
Out of curiosity, how did she pronounce “bleu”? And how do Americans generally pronounce it, in a cheesy context? And why the French spelling anyway?
I think most Americans pronounce “bleu cheese” exactly as if it was spelled “blue cheese”. IOW, with little or no attempt to French-ify the pronounciation. There are US-regional types of colored partly molded cheese which are spelled and pronounced “blue cheese” as well. Using the same pronounciation of “blue” you’d use to describe the sky or a paint color.
Aaargh! Zombie thread!
[Native Brit, US resident here] I agree with LSLGuy – in my experience in the US, it is invariably pronounced “blue”.
It’s intended to sound “classier”. Shocking, really, since the US has some very good blue-veined cheeses that do not need any non-English references to make them seem to be that which they are not.
I will admit that “bleu” as an outlier on an otherwise-English menu causes me instinctively to think less of the restaurant. If most of the menu is in French, then naturally I’m fine with “bleu”.
While we’re on the topic of Italian food pronunciations, I have a question I’d like to ask without starting a new thread.
I’m half Italian and like the guys in the OP my family has been here several generations (even my grandparents don’t speak but a few phrases of Italian). When we were young my grandmother would always make a dish that they pronounced, roughly “fratooda dosha”. I’ve never seen this anywhere except when my grandmother made it and haven’t found out what it’s supposed to be called - it’s some kind of creamy/doughy stuff that’s covered in breadcrumbs.
Anyway I’ve tried to research it to find out what it is but the pronunciation seems so corrupted (possibly influenced by dialects, and possibly by the fact that my family has lived in America for so long) it’s hard to search for. It’s pretty reasonable to guess that the second word is a variation of “dolce”, since it is a sweet dessert-like dish, but I still can’t find it.
Most Italian-born immigrants speak a mixture of three languages: Standard Italian, the dialect native to their region of Italy (usually their predominant choice), and English. And like most multilinguals, they jumble up both the accents and the languages themselves.
I’d consider the Puglia region (capital Bari) as the source for the pronunciation you are hearing. The Bari dialect is (formally) unwritten, but so far from Italian that Italian-speakers would not be able to understand it at all.
The Barese tend to truncate their words and the language sounds kind of gutteral. It is very different from formal Italian, where the words flow with a heavy emphasis on long flowing vowel endings.
Long-standing immigrants who return to Italy often find that their native dialects are being lost as Italian and English supplant them, in part due to television and greater mobility of society. Sometimes the best pockets of a particular regional language are in the older native population, either in Italy or with emigrants from that region living overseas.
One way to decide if what you are hearing is “authentic” is to find out what is spoken in the home of your friends. If the home speaks almost exclusively regional dialect, with a little Italian thrown in where the dialect fails, and no-one can speak standard English without a heavy accent, you are likely hearing a more authentic (dialect-influenced) pronunciation rather than a bastardization of some kind. If they mostly speak English, you might just be hearing lousy Italian with a few hangover pronunciations from a generation that died out…it’s not unusual for the older Barese to speak lousy Italian. So what you might be hearing is a Barese (for example) bastardization of Italian, if the family was regionalized enough before emigrating. Similar, say, to a Louisiana Creole speaking English.
I can only stumble along in Italia, but the closest I can think of for “fratooda” is “frutti di” (“fruit of”) which could be anything…the word “fruit” is used pretty broadly, as for example, “fruit” of the sea (frutti di mare) for various seafood or “frutti di dolce” (better dolci de frutta) for “sweet fruits.”
I did some more searching around last night and I’m starting to think it’s fritatta dolce, a dish made with eggs, sugar etc. Although the pictures I can find of it don’t look quite like what my grandmother made (she made it in these brownish nuggets), there’s a good chance it’s a variant of that. Now where they got that pronunciation I have no idea.
Those are what you hear in the NY / NJ area, I grew up there. You can also hear those same things on the Sopranos TV show.
Possibly frittura dolce rather than frittata?
Frittura sounds to me more like “fratooda” than fritatta does.
Frittura literally means “fried” and most recipes I can find online look a lot like a buttery or eggy fried dough, sometimes with sugar on it.
http://www.vallesoana.it/feb_06/doni_della_montagna/ricette/images/frittura_dolce%20.jpg
Am I the only one who doesn’t hear the z sound? I hear it as par-me-jhaan, not zhaan. Or pro-jhood, not pro-zhood.