The New York Times had an interesting article about Italian dialects, but the link will be unavailable in about two days. I've saved the article, and will summarize with extensive paraphase.

New Yorkers using Italian words will often drop the final vowel. "Mozzarella'' becomes "mozzarell," for example. Similarly, prosciutto, calzone, and pasta e fagioli become proscuit, calzoan, and pasta fasul. (That is, pro-SHOOT-toe, cal-TSO-nay and PAH-stah eh faj-YOH-lee become pro-SHOOT, cal-ZONE and pasta fa-ZOOL).

The Italians will tolerate. "The Italians - they don't correct," says a New Yorker. "They're not like the French, who will correct you." The director of an Italian cultural center agrees, saying, "Generally speaking, Italians are rather grateful to anyone who speaks in Italian."

But it goes deeper than this. There are currently 10 to 18 main dialects within Italy, and historically, each dialect is virtually a different language. The "standardized version" taught in American universities is based on 13th-century Florentine vernacular and pronunciations, and the class-conscious will sneer at anything less. Well, in that old Florentine version the final vowels are clearly enunciated. But in southern and northern dialects the dropping of final vowels is common. Restaurantgoers and food shoppers in the United States often end up hearing, and imitating, those dialects.

In other words, we're picking up our Italian from real speakers who hail from the north and south.

[My side comment: Notice that the author of the piece says "anything less than" standard Italian, rather than "anything other than." Prescriptivist!]

There's been some discussion of this article in the linguistics blogs. Here's my US$0.02: a lot of the Italians who emigrated to NY and NJ were from the South, Sicily and Calabria. The southern dialects do drop final vowels. One of the words that the article mentioned fazul for fagioli is a dialect word. Another example from the American TV series, The Sopranos, is the name of Tony Soprano's boat, the Stugotz which is an American transcription of the Sicilian for what is in Standard Italian questo cazzo 'these ballocks!' My grandmother's dialect, Genoese, has a phonemic inventory that is closer to French than to Standard (Tuscan) Italian. So do the other Gallo-Italian dialects: Piedmontese and Lombard, as well as the related dialects in Monaco and Nice (Nizza). Although the literary Tuscan dialect has been used as standard Italian for a longer period, education in Italy was only standardized around it in the last century and most Ialian immigrants to the US only spoke their native dialects.

A characteristic of the Spanish spoken in Venezuela, Panamá, and Puerto Rico is the silencing or "swallowing" of the final "s."

In standard Spanish, "we" is nosotros.
The name of the capital of Venezuela is usually pronounced caraca by those who live there.
To a girl from Caracas (a caraqueña), I once said, "Los caraqueños tragan la ese final." (People from Caracas swallow the final "s".)

She said, "Nosotro no."

It's like the anorexic girl looking in the mirror and seeing a normal person.

Or even, "Los otro(s) si; Yo, no"