Dominican Spanish


Dominican Spanish is Spanish as spoken in the Dominican Republic; and also among the Dominican diaspora, most of whom live in the United States, chiefly in New York City, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
Dominican Spanish, a Caribbean variety of Spanish, is based on the Andalusian and Canarian Spanish dialects of southern Spain, and has influences from Native Taíno and other Arawakan languages. Speakers of Dominican Spanish may also use conservative words that are similar to older variants of Spanish. The variety spoken in the Cibao region is influenced by the 16th and 17th-century Spanish and Portuguese colonists in the Cibao valley, and shows a greater than average influence by the 18th-century Canarian settlers.
Despite the large share of African ancestry among Dominicans, the African element in the local Spanish is not as important as one might expect.
There is also a significant influence from African languages in the Spanish spoken by Haitian and Afro-Caribbean migrant descendants in the Dominican Republic, particularly in grammar and phonetics. However, second generation immigrants from Haiti use to speak very close to the Dominican standard speech, if not actually speaking it, assimilating into the mainstream speech.

History

Most of the Spanish-speaking settlers came from Andalusia and the Canary Islands. When they first arrived in what is now the Dominican Republic, the first native people they had contact with were the Arawak-speaking Taino people.
Spanish, just as in other Latin American countries, completely replaced the indigenous languages of the Dominican Republic to the point where they became entirely extinct, mainly due to the fact that the majority of the indigenous population quickly died out only a few years after European contact.
However, when the Spanish arrived, they found the flora and fauna of the island, as well as various cultural artifacts, very different from those of Spain, so many of the words used by the natives to name these things were conserved and assimilated, thereby enriching Spanish lexicon. Some of these words include: ají, anón, batata, barbacoa, bejuco, bija, caiman, canoa, caoba, conuco, guanábana, guayaba, hamaca, hobo, hutía, iguana, jagua, maní, papaya, sabana, yuca.
Dominican Spanish also includes words indirectly borrowed from African languages via Portuguese, such as cachimbo, which was borrowed from the Portuguese word "cacimba", having the latter being borrowed from the Bantu "cazimba". Many of these African influences are quite distant and left a minor impact on modern day Dominican Spanish, and usually these words are also used in other Spanish-speaking countries as far-away as Argentina; therefore it is not just a phenomenon restricted to the Dominican Republic but common in the Latin American Spanish. Dominican Spanish has also received some limited influence from Haitian Creole, due to the Haitian occupation of Santo Domingo and continuing cross-border contacts. Haitian influence is stronger in border regions. Haitian Creole and Samaná English have also influenced the speech of Samaná Province further adding to the African influence found in the dialect.

Phonology

  • Like most other Spanish dialects, Dominican Spanish features yeísmo: the sounds represented by ll and y have fused into one. This merged phoneme is generally pronounced as a or. That is, in the Dominican Republic, se cayó "he fell down" is homophonous with se calló "he became silent / he shut up".
  • Dominican Spanish has seseo. That is, caza is homophonous with casa. Seseo is common to nearly all of Hispanic America, the Canary Islands, and southern Spain.
  • Strong contraction in everyday speech is common, as in "voy a" into "vuá" or "voá", or "¿para adónde vas?" into "¿p'a'nde va'?". Another example: "David 'tá 'co'ta'o", from "David está acostado", though vowel degemination is normal in most Spanish dialects, cf. Standard Peninsular "David est'acostado", normally pronounced with a single.
  • The fricative has a tendency to disappear or to become a voiceless glottal fricative at the end of syllables. The change may be realized only at the word level or it may also cross word boundaries. That is, las mesas son blancas "the tables are white" is pronounced , but in las águilas azules "the blue eagles", syllable-final in las and águilas might be resyllabified into the initial syllable of the following vowel-initial words and remain , or become . Aspiration or disappearance of syllable-final is common to much of Hispanic America, the Canary Islands, and southern Spain. Syllable-final is less frequently reduced in formal speech, like TV broadcasts.
  • *Example 1: To say lo niño or los niño, instead of los niños
  • *Example 2: To say lluvia ailada or lluvias ailada, instead of lluvias aisladas
  • Syllable-initial can occasionally be aspirated as well in rural parts of El Cibao. This occurs most often in the reflexive pronoun se and in sí 'yes'.
  • In some areas, speakers tend to drop the final r sound in verb infinitives. The elision is considered a feature of uneducated speakers in some places, but it is widespread in others, at least in rapid speech.
  • Syllable-final r tends to be changed in many words by an i sound in the Northerly Cibao and in El Seibo Province and by an l in the Eastern and in the capital city : the verb correr is pronounced correi and correl respectively, and perdón becomes peidón and peldón. Final is also merged into in El Cibao and El Seibo. This substitution with the i is delicately present in Andalusian Spanish, and also the l use is prototypical, and more marked, in Puerto Rican Spanish. It is believed to be of Andalusian origin.
  • The "d" is silent in the common word-ending -ado. For example, the words casado and lado are pronounced as casao and lao in Dominican Spanish.
  • In a few parts of the country, an "el" at the end of a word is pronounced as "err." For example, Miguel may be pronounced as Miguer in Dominican Spanish, a feature shared with Andalusian Spanish and in contrast to Puerto Rican Spanish, where the reverse occurs, e.g. pronouncing the name Arturo as Alturo.
  • Word-final is typically velarized at the end of a phrase or before another word starting in a vowel. Final may also be velarized word internally. In rural El Cibao, final may also be completely elided, typically nasalizing the preceding vowel, but occasionally it can be dropped entirely with no trace of nasalization. That total elision is most common among children.
  • The alveolar trill and even the tap can be replaced with an uvular trill among some rural speakers from El Cibao.
  • In rural parts of El Cibao, final unstressed vowels are often reduced in intensity and length, and post-tonic can be raised to, thus gallo 'rooster' can be pronounced like gallu. In oyó, third person singular preterite form of oír 'to hear', the initial is often also raised to by rural Cibaeños:.
Other differences with Standard Spanish include adding the s erroneously, thus overcompensating the habit of omitting it.
Example 1:
  • standard: administraciones públicas
  • vernacular: aminitracione pública
  • hypercorrected: asministracione púsblica
Example 2:
  • standard: jaguar
  • vernacular: jagual / jaguai
  • hypercorrected: jasguar
The hypercorrected form is often part of a blatantly sarcastic mode of speech, commonly used for joking rather than everyday speech. It's often called hablar fisno 'speaking finely', with an extra 's' in fino. Among rural children in El Cibao, s-insertion is still common, which calls into question its status as a hypercorrection since these children have little exposure to standard forms of speech. Word-internally, s-insertion is most common before voiceless stop consonants, especially, and almost never occurs before nasals. Rural residents of El Cibao frequently insert an s after function words, as in des todo 'of everything'. This is typically before stop consonants but can occasionally be before vowels, as in des animales 'of animals'. Some speakers also use final s-insertion as a prosodic boundary marker.
There are also hypercorrections of the merger of and into. For example, Haití 'Haiti' may be pronounced Artís.

Grammar

is unknown in Dominican Spanish.
Some well-known grammatical features of Dominican Spanish include the use of overt dummy pronouns, as in 'there is rice', especially prominent in El Cibao, instead of hay arroz, and double negation, as in yo no voy no 'I am not going'. Both of those are associated with more marginalized sociolects.
Pedro Henríquez Ureña claims that, at least until 1940, the educated population of the Dominican Republic continued to use the future subjunctive verb forms. Educated Dominicans never used the conditional in place of the imperfect subjunctive, as in Si yo habría visto 'If I had seen', nor did they ever use the imperfect subjunctive instead of the conditional, as in entonces yo hubiese dicho 'then I would have said'. Clitic object pronouns could often be placed after a finite verb, especially in narration, as in llega y vístese de prisa instead of the typical llega y se viste de prisa 'arrives and gets dressed quickly'.
Like in other Caribbean varieties of Spanish, explicit, redundant subject pronouns are frequent in Dominican Spanish. Pronominal uno 'one' may be frequently used, in cases where speakers of other varieties would use impersonal or reflexive se constructions. Personal subject pronouns can be used to refer to inanimate objects: Ella es grande 'She is big'.
Dominican Spanish allows for "preverbal placement of subjects with interrogatives and with non-finite clauses". In more normative speech, the subject would typically go after the verb instead. Some examples are: ¿Qué ustedes quieren comer? 'What do you guys want to eat?' and Eso es para Odalis llevárselo a Lari 'That's for Odalis to take it to Lari'.
Other prominent aspects of Dominican Spanish include focalizing ser constructions, and clause-final negation and affirmation:
  • Ustedes tenían que venir más temprano era 'You had to come earlier '
  • El francés, yo no sé no si es fácil de aprender 'French, I don't know if it's easy to learn'
  • Mamá sabía mucho sí 'Mom knew a lot'