How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained | Atlas Obscura

How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained | Atlas Obscura

"But this gets weird, because most Italian-Americans can trace their immigrant ancestors back to that time between 1861 and World War I, when the vast majority of "Italians," such as Italy even existed at the time, wouldn't have spoken the same language at all, and hardly any of them would be speaking the northern Italian dialect that would eventually become Standard Italian....

"'I grew up speaking English and Italian dialects from my family's region of Puglia,' says Gardaphe. 'And when I went to Italy, very few people could understand me, even the people in my parents' region. They recognized that I was speaking as if I was a 70-year-old man, when I was only 26 years old.' Italian-American Italian is not at all like Standard Italian; instead it's a construction of the frozen shards left over from languages that don't even really exist in Italy anymore with minimal intervention from modern Italian...."

Voiceless consonants become voiced, final vowels get dropped, "oh" gets raised to "ooh," and that's how capicola becomes gabagool.