Connecticut Culture & Language

Connecticut's culture is built on preservation. The town green, the white clapboard meeting house and the eighteenth-century centre survive in dozens of places because there was money to keep them.

Yale anchors the cultural life of New Haven, and its museums are free — the British Art Center holds the largest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum, opened in 1842, is the oldest continuously operating public art museum in the country.

Underneath the preserved surface is an industrial state with strong Italian, Polish, Irish and Puerto Rican communities, most visible in the food and in the cities rather than the towns.

The divide between the wealthy southwest and the former mill cities is the state's defining social fact, and residents will tell you so.

English is universal. Spanish is the significant second language, concentrated in the former mill cities, and Portuguese, Polish and Italian are still spoken in some neighbourhoods.

Local usage worth knowing: pizza in New Haven is apizza, pronounced roughly "ah-BEETS". A package store — never a liquor store — is where you buy wine and spirits. The northeast of the state is the Quiet Corner, and the wealthy southwest shore is known as the "Gold Coast".

The state's name is pronounced without the second "c".