"Yo, Fucking-A New York-New Jersey English"

Do you think your speech style has anything in common with this description? I thought this part of it was interesting:

People who are not from New York often complain that New Yorkers interrupt them, don’t listen, and don’t give them a chance to talk. Typically, the New Yorker starts talking before the Californian is finished, so the Californian, piqued, stops talking. So who’s interrupting? The New Yorker? Not necessarily. Who said only one person can talk at a time?

In a really good New York conversation, more than one person is talking a lot of the time. Throughout the conversations I have taped and analyzed, New York listeners punctuate a speaker’s talk with comments, reactions, questions (often asking for the very information that is obviously about to come). None of this makes the New York speaker stop. On the contrary, he talks even more—louder, faster—and has even more fun, because he doesn’t feel he’s in the conversation alone. When a non-New Yorker stops talking at the first sign of participation from the New Yorker, he’s the one who’s creating the interruption, making a conversational bully out of a perfectly well-intentioned cooperative overlapper.

It does seem to me that there's a New York style of talking where you inject phrases to show that you're listening. And I think most New Yorkers understand that style of talk, even if they don't practice it themselves, so they don't feel turned off by it.

The language I would like to learn is Italian. I know lots of the food stuff (but you only have to watch Sopranos to get that!), and before the times I've gone there on vacation, I've revved up, and did pretty well with the basics. But it fades so quickly...

Non ero mai stata in Italia, ma parlo un po'. Maybe next summer...

I'm thinking it was Doris Day, but I may be wrong... there was a pretty sloppy sentimental song on the hit parade what, 50 years ago?

Throw momma from the train a kiss. . .

Which is not to be confused with Throw Yo Yo Ma from the Train. . .(scroll down)

aMike

My parents claim that in Milwaukee when they were growing up, it was common to hear English spoken with German grammar - I have no idea if this is true or not

It is very true, and it is still there, it is the basis of much of the local "dialect" known affectionately as "Milwaukee-ese." Most often cited examples: "make out the light" and "where the corner turns the bend."

With a quick google, there are some more good examples at the top here

In the link examples, it shows that it's mostly the sentence structure problem, which doesn't copy German exactly, rather it's like a German trying to figure out what order to put the English words in, and getting it wrong. People jumble the order of words and the content comes out as a malapropism. For some reason, it continued as a valid way of speaking, a little bit of a dialect, with people lapsing into it with family and friends even though they know the proper way to do it. Possibly because there were so many German immigrants there at one time that no disapproval was expressed to those talking that way?

In any case, this is something that southern Wisconsin people are proud of, they think it's funny but they are not embarassed by it. Whenever a newspaper columnist or some such there is having a spot of writer's block, he can throw in something on Milwaukee-ese and you can be sure it will be clipped by Milwaukee moms and sent all over the country to ex-pats.

What interests me about some of it as someone experienced with both cultures that there is also a bit of overlap in Milwaukee-ese with Brooklynese of the Yogi Berra or "Dead End Kids" type (which follows through to tough guy/Cagney gangster talk,), there is a lot in common, such as using the d for the th, "dees" for these, "der" for there, and things like "youse guys." I suspect that that's because you had Yiddish influencing that in Brooklynese and German doing the same in Milwaukee? But the mixed-up sentence structure seems to be Milwaukee's own.