Wanjiru Waweru, Jadetimes Staff
W. Waweru is a Jadetimes News Reporter Covering America News
A new dialect has been materializing from certain sections of Miami because of cultural barriers between Spanish and English Speakers. The distinct dialect is a Spanish-language dialect of English that spent many years in the experience of Immigration to Southern Florida from Spanish-speaking countries.
Miami is one of the most recent bilingual cities in the United States. Indy 100 states that “Miami consists of a majority Hispanic and Latino population. In recent decades, the Spanish languages has mixed with American English, resulting in a new dialect consisting of its own expressions, and phrases.”
Linguistics at Florida International University in Miami reported that linguistic development is a great example of how human languages develop the shape-shifting in historical, and social situations.
According to IFLScience, Professor Philip M. Carter, a Director of the Center for Humanities in an Urban Environment at the Florida International University reported the important role of bilingualism between English and Spanish in the Miami community, where they spent more than a decade to review the research study.
“All words, dialects, and languages have a history. In Miami, there are many ways of speaking English,” said Carter. The variety we have been studying for the past 10 years or so is the main language variety of people born in South Florida in Latinx-majority communities. The variety is characterized by some unique but ultimately minor pronunciations, some minor grammatical differences, and word differences, which are influenced by the longstanding presence of Spanish in South Florida.
The new dialects took the perspective of the Spanish-language explaining, and automatically adapted them into the English language, therefore maintaining the structure of Spanish of the phrase which popularized as a calque.
According to Indy 100, “For example, ‘bajar del carro’ becomes ‘get down from the car’ – not ‘get out of the car’ as you would expect to see in most American English dialects.”
This new dialect is not only translated where bilingual speakers adopted it. Linguists realized that Native English Speakers adopted certain phrases as well. Carter also mentioned the adaptation in the bilingual mindset between English and Spanish.
“These are examples of literal lexical calques – direct translations,” said Carter. “ What is remarkable about them is that we found they were not only used in the speech of immigrants – folks who are leaning on their first language Spanish as they navigate the acquisition of English – but also among their children, who learned English as their co-first language.”
In 2022, Carter, and Lingust expert Kristin D’ Allessandro Merii held out research to document Spanish nationally in the English language in South Florida. A group of Immigrants from South Florida was asked to participate in a familiar task.
The research was studied by providing questions to 33 people in Miami especially a mixture of Cuban Americans from all generations. What they think about over 50 sentences that became a typical new dialect. The previous sentence ranked from they listened “perfect”, “okay”, “awkward”, or “horrible”.
They reviewed their studies and they found the average dialect as “natural” for Miami residents, however, people living outside of the city saw the significance of isolation. indy 100 explained that “Highlighting that dialects are born by subtle differences adding up until people who don't speak the dialect find it ungrammatical.”
