2023-06-28 17:42:40
The Spanish language is heard everywhere in Miami – in stores, bars, restaurants, doctor’s appointments, or banks. The ubiquity of Spanish is changing the way English is spoken in this American city.
Research led by Phillip Carter, professor of Linguistics and English at Florida International University (FIU), discovered the existence of a dialect of this language in the south of the state of Florida.
The new variant of English has traces of Spanish, that is, it assimilates expressions of the language translated literally.
So, in Miami, a person can say “get down from the car” instead of “get out of the car”, influenced by “bajarse del carro”, or “put the light”, instead of “turn on the light”, in a derivation of the Spanish “pon la luz”.
The resulting English sounds strange to the rest of the country’s inhabitants.
The use of shoes is common among immigrants when they learn the language of the host country, but it tends to disappear with subsequent generations, Carter, 43, told AFP.
Based on interviews with citizens of Latin American origin, his study demonstrated that, in South Florida, this is not always the case.
“We were surprised to find that many of these expressions do not disappear with the generation of immigrants”, said the professor.
“It was interesting to see that some of these expressions rubbed off on their children and grandchildren. Not all, but some remain. That’s why we refer to it as a dialect, something people learn as a first language that includes some of those Spanish-influenced traits.”
– Fruit of coexistence –
According to the US Census, 69.1% of Miami-Dade County’s population is Hispanic. The coexistence of English and Spanish is, therefore, a daily reality for many inhabitants of the region.
The phenomenon was caused by the arrival of thousands of Cubans, after the 1959 Revolution on the island, and reinforced by migratory movements from other Latin American countries, such as Colombia and Venezuela.
This proximity between languages, with a constant oscillation from one to the other in the same sentence, had already created the so-called “spanglish”, a variety of Spanish full of anglicisms and linguistic traces taken from English, spoken in various parts of the United States.
“There isn’t a single language that doesn’t have words borrowed from another,” says Carter. “The borrowing (of words) is an inescapable reality of the languages of the world. When there are two languages spoken by the majority of the population, many interesting linguistic contacts happen”, he added.
Camilo Mejía, 47, celebrates the cultural diversity of Miami, where he works at an NGO.
In Miami, “you not only learn about other cultures, but also about a culture that is the result of many people from different backgrounds who have come together, live together and create new things together”.
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