MIAMI, Fla. – While Florida has plenty of native slang, it turns out that an entirely new way of speaking has come about in the Sunshine State.
More specifically, it’s been noticed emerging in the Miami area: a mingling of both English and Spanish languages now dubbed by some as “Miami English.”
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Prof. Phillip Carter, a linguistics expert with Florida International University, has been studying the phenomenon with fellow FIU researchers.
“There is a dialect of English that is emerging in South Florida that owes in part to the historical influence for Spanish, beginning with the end of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 that created a demographic situation that included the contact between Spanish, English that has gone on now for over 60 years,” Carter explained.
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To be precise, this new way of speaking appears to be a “calque,” which is a word-for-word translation from one language to another.
“Speakers are using their original language, Spanish, to translate their concepts into English words, and then those features get passed down to the next generation, which is what happened here,” Carter stated.
An example Carter provided would be a phrase like “Get out of the car,” which these speakers translate directly from Spanish to English.
“In Miami, you hear people who are native speakers of English — not immigrants — people who are speaking their native dialect of English, who say, ‘Get down from the car,‘" he explained.
Recent reports have described the phenomenon as an emerging “language,” though Carter said it’s more accurate to call it a new dialect.
In this case, it was created due to Spanish speakers coming into contact with the native English-speaking population, Carter posited.
“When two language groups come into contact with one another, and as one of those languages is lost over time, it often leaves certain phrases of its linguistic features behind that get incorporated into the new dialect,” he said.
Some other calque examples that Carter provided are as follows:
- “Meat”
- The word “carne” can refer specifically to beef or the entire category of meat, so speakers may substitute the word “beef” for “meat” when discussing dishes like “meat empanadas” or “meat casseroles.”
- “Actually”
- The term “actualmente” means “right now,” so a speaker may say something like, “Actually, I’m going to the movies,” which really means, “I’m going to the movies right now.”
- “Already”
- In Spanish, the word “already” can be used to mark future events. As such, a speaker may say, “I’m already graduating in two years,” which in reality means, “In two years, I will have graduated.”
And with spoken Spanish declining in South Florida, this dialect is only getting stronger, Carter claimed.
“Spanish is disappearing in Miami, as it is everywhere else in the United States,” he said. “Even though people think that it’s growing or proliferating, it’s only proliferating because of immigration. But once those immigrants have kids, their kids become predominantly English speakers, and the grandkids become almost always English-only speakers.”
Carter told News 6 that he and his fellow researchers are going to continue looking into the features of this developing dialect, though they want to figure out how prominent it has become between different ethnic groups.
“This phenomenon that we’ve been talking about is definitely an aspect of Cuban-American speech...” he said. “Colombians are now the second-largest national origin group in Miami, behind Cubans, and followed by Nicaraguans, and then followed by Venezuelans. And we want to find out to what extent are those national origin groups using these same structures. Is everybody kind of participating in this dialect formation, or is it really just a function of Cuban-Americans? We’re going to start looking at that type of stuff, too.”