Between God(fathers) and Good(fellas): to Kill, to Slur, to Eat in Tony Soprano's Words

The aim of this paper is to show how David Chase’s TV series The Sopranos (1999-2007) has translated – that is, literally, “transferred” and “transmitted” – the canonical filmic figure of the Italian American gangster as outlined in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (Part I and II) and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, into an end-of-the-century climate marked by diminished expectations and anxiety. By analysing the language used in the well-known HBO series, which aired from 1999 to 2007, as a dynamic mixture of Italian and English words, American slang and Mafia jargon, it is possible to argue that the non-standard and working-class language which has come to be known as “Sopranos-Speak” bears vivid witness to the process of assimilation of second- and third-generation Italian-Americans by harking back to southern Italian dialects both in lexicon and phonology. Consistently with a latter-day (and somewhat decayed) version of their glorious “Godfathers”, these mobsters share an ongoing attention on silence as a survival strategy; unlike their cinematographic predecessors, however, Tony & Co. linguistically emphasize lower-mimetic realm of ethnic slurs and food.