Italian and Spanish and “Sangwitch”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Diana from Sogarty’s, New York in the Hudson Valley.

Oh, nice.

What’s on your mind, Diana?

Well, I really, really love hearing about the derivation of words.

And I got to think that, you know, my mother used to always want to talk about, you know, having something for lunch or whatever.

Instead of saying sandwich, she’d say sandwich, like S-A-N-G, like sandwich.

She’s Italian, and all my relatives on that side, the Italian side, all said sandwiched that way, saying, like, with a G in there.

I’m like, what?

First, I thought it was just her, but now they all do it.

And I also noticed watching The Sopranos, the TV show, that they say that pronunciation also.

And so I’m thinking, is this something Italian-American, like an affectation from Italian immigrants?

Or maybe it was just a New York area.

I’m not really sure.

I’m wondering if you guys have any idea how the G got in sandwich.

Oh, boy, do we?

Yeah.

This is a wonderful little example of something that linguists have studied.

And it happens with speakers of first languages like Italian and Spanish when they try to say words like sandwich, where they have that N-D-W in the middle.

Because those sounds of that N and the D and the W, those three sounds in a row simply don’t occur in native Italian or Spanish words.

So they have difficulty with that.

So it’s not an affectation.

What it is is they substitute those three sounds with the closest sounds that they have in their native phonetic inventory.

And it’s what’s called a velar nasal stop, which makes the word come out like sandwich.

So it’s a very nasalized, almost NG.

And one of the really interesting things about this is small-scale research was done in Toronto, and it was found that the word sandwich, the pronunciation, starts with the first-generation immigrants.

And because it’s largely a kitchen word, that is, it’s kind of between family members, it continues to the second and third generation.

But people are likely to stop saying it if someone points it out and say, oh, that’s not the way that everyone else says it.

And nobody says sandwich in the second and third generation if their parents didn’t say it.

So the fact that all those other people say it in the Italian side of your family is because of those two people who migrated from Italy.

And they passed it down as kind of this family pronunciation.

Oh, interesting.

Because I don’t know if I ever said it.

I don’t remember if, I don’t think so.

Maybe when I was younger and I don’t remember.

But it’s funny because I know my mother said that she spoke Italian before she spoke English.

Yeah.

And this is a TV show, the HBO show, The Sopranos.

They said it and I was like, oh, this is something to do with Italians.

Right.

There’s a pattern here.

Yeah, and it’s funny that you should mention The Sopranos because that show and other shows about Italian-Americans have made Sanguage less stigmatized than it might otherwise be.

Because people are like, oh yeah, okay, so people from Italy or of Italian-American heritage say that.

Okay, that’s fine.

And they move on.

Whereas if people encountered it on their own and they didn’t have this data point or this reference, they might really belittle people who said that or criticize them severely.

But now, since you have a little bit of data, you can slot this in and say, oh, I know something about this, and I don’t need to criticize it too much because it makes sense to me.

And so this is really a key part of what Martha and I do here when we always say if you find yourself angry or irritated by something about language, it’s probably because you don’t have enough data.

Well, thank you so much, and I just enjoy your show so much.

Oh, our pleasure.

Call us again sometime, all right?

I will try to think of something else and do that, yeah.

Please do.

Okay, guys, thanks.

Have a great day.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Take care, Diane.

You’re welcome.

Bye.

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