Is this a common practice among native Italian speakers?

My mother in law is a little old lady from Italy – and she does this also.

counter = count
potato = potat

Even names. Frank becomes Fra – Marisa becomes Mari – Christopher becomes Christ

which, frankly is a lot to live up to

@cprevite: does it drive you nuts?

Is the ending kind of like swallowed or inhaled, or is it just completely cut off clean, without a breath or a whisper after the last audible syllable?

@Jeruba: completely cut off.

@poofandmook: No not at all. I grew up around thick Italian accents. I’m used to it.

I never thought about it before, but it does seem to be true, I can think of a few Italians I know who do it. Do they do it in Italian also?

I’m familiar with the Italian accent where a vowel is added to the end of English words that end in a consonant. In standard Italian most words end in vowels. But there are many different kinds of Italian, and it’s possible that some Italian dialects delete final vowels.

The other night I watched Vittorio de Sica’s 1948 classic The Bicycle Thief. Even though I don’t know Italian, I can make out lot of words and recognize names. With this question in mind, I listened, and it seemed to me that I heard Anton’ for Antonio, Mari’ for Maria, and Brun’ for Bruno.

Speaking as an italian, it’s probably because of the region she comes from. In some regions it’s a common way of speaking to cut off the last part of people’s names for brevity’s sake, my father used to call his grandma “Marì”, short for Maria, and many people cut short objects’ names as well.

When I worked in an Italian restaurant, it was common for those of recent Italian ancestry to drop the last syllable of many Italian words. Prosciutto became prosciutt’, ricotta became ricott’, and so on. It’s entirely possible that she just carried this speech over to English.