If you find yourself in certain parts of Miami, you may well come across a distinct new dialect that’s been developing in the city – a unique combination of Spanish and American English that’s been dubbed “Miami English”.
Over the last decade, researchers at the city’s Florida International University (FIU) have been closely following its emergence.
“All words, dialects, and languages have a history,” Professor Phillip M. Carter, Director of the Center for Humanities in an Urban Environment at FIU, told IFLScience.
“In Miami, there are many ways of speaking English. 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,” he added. “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.”
So, what does Miami English sound like?
It typically involves translating a Spanish phrase into English, but keeping the structure of the original phrase, known in linguistics as a calque.
Phrases like “bajar del carro” become “get down from the car” instead of the more typical American English, “get out of the car”. You might hear someone saying they’re going to “make a party” rather than “throw a party”.
Those aren’t just phrases you might hear from the bilingual communities that first developed them though – Carter has found the dialect has spread.
“What is remarkable about [the calques] 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,” said Carter.
But despite its wider adoption, the emergence of a new dialect often comes with stigma attached to it, particularly when it’s sprung up from marginalized communities. Carter questions why that stigma should exist when the rise of different dialects has played such an important part in the evolution of language.
“I want Miami English to lose its stigma because Miami English is someone’s home language variety. It’s the language that person learned from their parents, that they used in school, that they hear in their community. It’s the language variety they developed their identity in, developed their friendships in, found love in. Why should that be stigmatized?” asks Carter.
“This principle holds to any and every language variety. There is no reason to stigmatize any form of human language. Doing so reflects our own limited understanding of humanity and human language. All human language varieties are a reflection of the miraculous interweaving of our evolutionary capacity for language with the unique historical and cultural circumstances in which that capacity finds context,” he added.
