Quote:
Originally Posted by Father'sDaughter
I'm just saying that all the Italians I knew growing up (most of us were from Sicily, Calabria, Puglia, Basilicata and Abruzzo) never dropped vowels. When I was young I spent two months in Calabria and Basilicata and I never heard dropped vowels. The first time I ever heard an "Italian" dropping vowels was on the first episode I watched of the Sopranos.
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Here's a page with some good links, including a site that has audio recordings of modern poets who write in dialect. If you browse that, you'll see that many dialects cut off what in Standard Italian would be a final vowel.
I honestly have no explanation for why you've never heard an Italian speak in a manner than de-emphasizes, swallows, or drops vowels at the ends of words because it's a very well documented phenomenon.
All I can say is that, when my family gets together, we all speak in a particular southern Korean dialect. But when we hang out with the larger Korean community, we more or less speak standard Seoul Korean, albeit with an accent. That doesn't mean the way we talk amongst ourselves doesn't exist.
But if I go back to my family's hometown in Korea, people think I'm crazy because nobody my age speaks like I do anymore there.
In addition, much of my dad's family, which was higher class, speaks closer to standard Seoul Korean while my mom's family, which was more working class, all have a really strong regional accent and use dialect words very thickly.
And when I visit parts of Europe where I speak the language but the locals speak a particular version of the language, people don't speak to me in the local "color". They speak very standard French, German, etc. to me--because I'm obviously not a local who is necessarily to understand them if they use the local slang, etc.
These are all factors in how one experiences language.