I’ve currently been re-watching each season of The Sopranos, and have heard, from time to time as the show’s commenced, characters refer to other mobbed-up characters as “walyos”. Initially, during the early seasons, I thought they were saying “Y.O.”, but I’m on the last season right now (where the subtitles are generally more accurate) and I see that it is, indeed, “walyo”.
So. Anybody know what it means or refers to?
From “The Sopranos: A Viewer’s Glossary”:
The people who do subtitles don’t always know what they’re talking about.
A thousand thanks for the link and the info! I’m in OC heaven!
I didn’t know about the “Gangs of New York” reference but when I was a kid my grandfather (an Italian immigrant) used to call me “walyo”. I know a couple of other guys, Italian-Americans like myself, who also were referred to by that name. I always had the sense that the meaning of walyo was “boy”, with a slightly derogatory spin, as in I, the walyo, was somehow not of the same social stature as my grandfather who used the term. In fact, I can remember that my friends and I would sometimes call each other walyo by way of affectionate ball-busting. Barbara Grizutti Harrison also mentions walyo in her book, The Italians. While I don’t remember well what she had to say, I seem to recall that the word derives from Moorish influence in Sicily some centuries ago.
I have seen the Sopranos subtitles use “walyo”, and that’s how it sounded to me when I heard Carmela Soprano say it. Also when I was a child, my mom - whose parents came from Italy - would sometimes affectionately call me “walyo”. I wished I had asked her then if she knew the derivation of it. Anyway, a similar-sounding word in Italian is “Voglio”, meaning " I want…" , which Italians pronounce “Volyo”, sometimes with the “l” so soft you can barely hear it. Given that little kids say " I want…" a lot, it seems to me the Italian “I want…” could have been the derivation: affectionate or maybe slightly derogatory for a kid. Then later in life a kind of a ball-busting way to call someone a “kid” or “boy”.
Walyo doesn’t come from Voglio, it comes from Guaglione, which is Neapolitan for “boy, young man”, but is also sort of used casually for “guy”, so if you’re saying somebody’s un bravo guaglione, you’re saying he’s a good guy.
But they do ! The subtitle person knew their Italian . Whyo came from the Neapolitan dialect “guaglione” . Along the way it was “walyo” .
See http://sbp.so/yo
Unrelated link
Welcome to the SDMB, @Gemrides.
Please note that the post you are replying to is from 2013, and the thread itself dates to 2010. Don’t expect links from almost a decade ago to still be functional. 
The domain name has been usurped in the 9 years since Isider posted that. This is what it looked like back then.
Okay. We know what a walyo is. Now why do Egyptians talk about them in that Bangles song?
Is that a sincere question? Every lyric site I checked had the background lyric as “way yo, way yo, way oh way yo” or something very similar.
Great. Now I have The Swinging Erudites playing in my head.