>>26045
>butchered the Italian language
Not really. "Italian" as a language is hard to define except relative to other languages. France would have a similar situation with Provencals and Occitans and Bretons and Normans and Alsatians if it weren't for the French language schools, even if said schools today would be called ethnic cleansing. Italian-American slang is rooted in the language of mostly illiterate Southern peasants and craftsmen from hundreds of years before the modern day. Many of the foremost authorities of these peasants were from Naples or Sicily, and the languages in Naples and Sicily sound fucked up to Northerners and always have. Now imagine taking thousands upon thousands of these peasants and shipping them to a place which not only speaks a language two degrees removed from theirs, but requires them to live around multiple peoples who speak multiple other languages and are in similar conditions to them in an environment where learning the native language isn't promoted. The Italian you hear today is based on the language of Rome (the city).