No, they pronounce it correctly.
I think OP was asking about young kids who are still learning to pronounce words correctly.
Exactly, it’s Pischetti
Bruschetta
I was once an Italian kid. My parents would have beat me if I pronounced spaghetti wrong.
So no. They don’t.
And if they do, they won’t be able to tell you after
Kids are about the only thing Italians can beat in a fight.
Amirite?
Ah yes, threats of abuse, famous for always having the outcome they intend
[edit: especially when dealing with children who are still developing their ability to speak and comprehend speech]
It was a critique of being raised by Italian parents in the 80s/90s. Please be aware that I made a joke
It was good. I enjoyed it. Not everything needs to trigger some morally righteous response in our world.
How do you mispronounce something with your hands?
“Thank you” and “bullshit” are pretty close in American Sign Language.
It happens!
Thank you and bitch are much closer. At least the way I learned bullshit involved two hands.
From what I remember the last time I heard an Italian kid mispronounce spaghetti they just skipped the s so the result was paghetti.
Heh. When my daughter was small, she could say spaghetti, but also added the initial “s” to baguette, making it a “spaguette” .
We’re German, by the way, so we frequently eat both.
I always thought the mispronunciation was more of a puhscetti than a buhsgetti
I’ve encountered both. The two I mentioned got the point across.
We say spuhghetti around these parts.
I feel like I’m misunderstanding the joke though.
The pronunciations you have in your head are mispronunciations that some children & uneducated people use.
Yes, that’s why OP is asking if Italian children make similar mispronunciations. Like is it an artifact of learning a word that sounds like that in general or of learning it in the context of English specifically?
No, we don’t.
I can’t say this with 100% certainty, but Italians migrated to America at the end of the 19th century. And they did so from the poorer south. So I’ve heard that American Italian communities speak Italian like modern day grandparents. Here’s an article on why American Italians pronounce cappacola gabagol.
Surely they must do? Like kids are not going to find certain sounds like ‘sp’ easier depending on what country they’re from but maybe the sounds they learn first with be different?
it was ‘sketti’ for me back then, and it is still decades later.
Pronounciation differs in Italian, so when they mispronounce, it probably wont’t sound like their American counter parts.
Kids do in fact have an easier time pronouncing syllables they hear about them. And from about age 3 it starts going downhill. At 9 it’s near impossible to learn to speak a new language without accent.
That’s true, but also, speech-motor control develops throughout childhood, and one of the last things children develop is consonant clusters. This means words like (sp)a(gh)etti are harder for most children to say than, for example, “banana”, regardless of their language. Children tend to replace difficult clusters with one of their sounds, and when there’s more than one difficult cluster in a word, sometimes the other sound of one gets transposed in place of the other.
I’ve heard that it’s until 12~14, depending on exposure.
I know people who moved to Canada from countries with little exposure at or after the age of 9 who still speak their mother tongue at home, and yet have no accent at all when speaking English. A very linguistically different language from English, at that.
I agree, but things like “Sp”, is that common in italian? I’m not sure but I’m thinking not. It’s interesting and now I need someone with an Italian toddler to chip in.
deleted by creator
I don’t know if OP changed the title before I saw this thread, but I’ve never seen so many people missing the point in one place.
It’s like they went to Larry’s Fart Emporum and complained about the smell.
And, no. I did not change the title.
Why shall Italiens pronounce like Americans?
They are asking because kids are kids no matter where you live. If we use the same word for the dish as Italians, it stands to reason that children who are still learning would have the same issue regardless of location.
Exactly! I think one of the fun things about growing up is realizing that your personal experience isn’t completely unique, and that other people have shared similar experiences. I also don’t think it’s weird to have the idea that many of the things we enjoy and find funny (like puns and silly sounds) would cross language and cultural boundaries.
Farts are universally funny
It’s the same word on paper, but pronounced different. Italians tend to speak the vowels longer, with a slightly different sound (the “a” in American sounds like an “uh”, in Italian like a long “ah”). They also speak out both t’s separately.
So how do Italian kids tend to misprounce the word as they’re developing speech?
No idea really.
Kids being a blank canvas and universal is a theory that’s been deemed untrue. The kids would have been subjected to s very different soundscape of periode talking and will have practiced different sounds long before they started using words.
You know there are sources for sound and moving pictures on the internet?
