Why most Italian Americans don't speak Italian

A month, and a number

Congress designated October 1989 as Italian-American Heritage and Culture Month in a joint resolution signed into law on 25 October 1989, and President George H. W. Bush had issued the proclamation two weeks earlier¹². It has been observed every October since, some years by presidential proclamation and every year by the states, cities, schools and parishes that never needed one.

Here is the number worth sitting with. In the 2024 American Community Survey, 16.3 million people reported Italian ancestry, about one American in twenty³. In the same survey, 507,000 people aged five and over said they speak Italian at home⁴. In 2000 that figure was just over a million. In 1980 it was 1.6 million⁵. Put the two together and, for every thirty-two Americans with Italian roots, one speaks Italian at home.

So if you grew up with Italian words at the table and cannot hold a conversation, you are not the exception. You are the pattern. And the pattern has a cause that most people have never been told.

The Italy they left did not speak Italian yet

Italy became one country in 1861. The linguist Tullio De Mauro estimated that at unification about 630,000 people out of 25 million, roughly 2.5 percent, could actually speak Italian. Arrigo Castellani later argued the real figure was closer to 10 percent⁶. Either way, the overwhelming majority spoke the language of their own town and province: Neapolitan, Sicilian, Calabrese, Pugliese, Abruzzese, and hundreds of local varieties within them.

These are not accents, and they are not slang. Linguists treat them as languages in their own right, with their own grammar and their own sounds, that grew out of Latin in parallel with the Tuscan that became Italian⁶. Italian was the language of books, of the new state and of the school. For most people it was something you were taught, not something you were born into.

Then came the migration. Between 1880 and 1914 nearly four million people left Italy for the United States⁷, and about four in five of them came from the South and Sicily⁸. So the Italian that arrived at Ellis Island was almost never the Italian of the textbook. It was the speech of Avellino, Bari, Palermo and Cosenza. A family from Naples and a family from Palermo on the same block could struggle to follow each other, and both would have struggled with a schoolteacher from Florence.

What happened at the kitchen table

Three things then worked against the language in America, and they stacked.

• The door shut. The 1924 quota law gave Italy 3,845 immigrant visas a year, a fraction of the pre-war flow⁹. With almost no new arrivals, there was nobody to refresh the language in the neighborhood.
• The war. During World War II more than 600,000 Italian-born residents were branded enemy aliens and made to carry identification cards and accept travel restrictions. More than 50,000 lived under curfew, and more than 10,000 on the West Coast were forced from their homes¹⁰. Speaking Italian in public became something a family learned to be careful about.
• The generations. Immigrant languages in the United States follow a well-documented arc. The first generation speaks it, the second understands it and answers in English, the third keeps a few words. A study of linguistic life expectancies found that even Spanish, the most resilient immigrant language in the country, is effectively gone by the third generation¹¹.

And there was a fourth thing, quieter than the others. The dialect carried no prestige, not even at home. In Italy the schools taught standard Italian and treated dialect as something to grow out of, and the country followed: by 2015 only 14 percent of Italians said they mainly spoke dialect at home, while 46 percent mainly spoke Italian¹².

So the grandchild who finally signed up for an Italian class found that the words from the kitchen were marked wrong, and the cousins from Italy, when they visited, spoke something else again. A lot of people quietly concluded that they had never really had Italian at all. They had. It just was not the one that got written down.

So which Italian should you learn?

Standard Italian. Not because the dialect is lesser, but because standard Italian is the language every Italian is schooled in, the one a stranger in Bologna or Bari will switch to the moment they hear you trying, and the one with the films, the books and the coaches behind it. Nearly four in five Italians use it at home, alone or alongside dialect¹².

The dialect words you remember are not something to unlearn. They are a head start. Most of them are standard Italian words wearing a southern pronunciation: the last vowel goes quiet and a hard consonant softens, a pattern linguists have traced through southern speech¹³. Once you can hear the standard word underneath, you already own it.

What to do with this October, or any month

• Find the town. Not Italy, not even Sicily. Ask who is still around, turn over the photographs, read the ship manifests. The town tells you which words you grew up with and where to go when you are ready.
• Learn out loud, not in silence. Heritage speakers usually understand far more than they can say. The gap is in the mouth, not the ear, and a reading app builds the part you already have.
• Say one sentence to someone who would recognize it. A relative, a neighbor, the man at the deli. One sentence in standard Italian, and the answer is practice too.
• Do not wait for a class. Italian enrollments at American colleges fell from 80,000 in 2009 to 45,000 in 2021¹⁵. The classes are getting rarer. The reason to speak is not.

The language did not die in your family. It changed its address twice, once from a village to a city, and once from one tongue to another. October is a good month to start sending it back.