Linguists have identified new dialect of English emerging in Florida

“I made the line to pay for groceries” (I stood in line to pay for the food). “He made a party to celebrate his son’s birthday” (he had a party to celebrate his son’s birthday). These phrases may sound strange to the ears of most Americans Anglo-Saxon speaking.

However, in Miami they have been integrated into the local language. According to research I recently published, these expressions and many others are part of a new dialect that is forming in South Florida.

This linguistic variety comes from systematic contact between Spanish and English speakers, especially from direct translations from Spanish.

When French met English

Even if you speak English and live in Miami or anywhere else, you probably don’t know for sure where the words you use every day come from.

You may know that a limited number of words, usually foods, such as “sriracha” either “croissant” They are linguistic borrowings from other languages. However, there are many more loanwords than you imagine.

In fact, they are everywhere in the English and Spanish vocabulary: “pajamas” comes from Hindi; “gazelle” from Arabic through French and “tsunami” from Japanese.

Loanwords generally develop in the minds and speech of bilingual speakers, who end up moving between different places and cultures. It usually happens when events such as wars, colonialism, political exile, immigration or climate change bring people belonging to different linguistic groups into contact.

When that contact is maintained over a long period of time, over decades spanning several generations or even more, language structures become intertwined and speakers begin to share their respective vocabularies.

A bilingual confluence changed the trajectory of the English language. In 1066, the Norman French, led by William the Conqueror, invaded England, creating what is now known as “The Norman Conquest.”

Soon after, the French-speaking ruling class replaced the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy, and for about 200 years, England’s elites, including kings, did their business in French.

English never really caught on among the aristocracy, but since servants and the middle classes needed to communicate with aristocrats and marriages occurred between people of different social classes, French words filtered through the social hierarchy and into the language.

During that period, English took on more than 10,000 loanwords from French, mainly in areas dominated by the aristocracy: the arts, the military, medicine, law, and religion. The words of the English vocabulary that today seem basic and even fundamental to us were taken from French just 800 years ago, such as prince, government, administration, freedom, court, prayer, judge, justice, literature, music and poetry, for example. just mention a few.

The encounter of Spanish with English in Miami

Fast forward to the present day to discover that a similar form of language contact between Spanish and English has been occurring in Miami since the Cuban Revolution ended in 1959.

In the years after the revolution, hundreds of thousands of Cubans left the island for South Florida, setting the stage for what would become one of the most important linguistic convergences in all of America.

Today, the vast majority of the population is bilingual. In 2010, more than 65% of the population of Miami-Dade County identified as Hispanic or Latino, and in the large municipalities of Doral and Hialeah that number rises to 80% and 95%respectively.

Of course, identifying as Latino is not synonymous with speaking Spanish, as there has been a loss of the language among second- and third-generation Cuban Americans. But the point is that in Miami a lot of Spanish and English are spoken.

Bilingual people are part of that mix. Some are more proficient in Spanish and others speak English fluently, but together they navigate the complex sociolinguistic context of South Florida, knowing when and with whom to use each language, as well as the right time to mix them.

When the first large group of Cubans arrived in Miami as a result of the revolution, they did precisely that, following two paths.

First, people alternated between Spanish and English, sometimes within the same sentence or phrase. That set the stage for the lasting presence of Spanish in South Florida, as well as for the emergence of what some people call “spanglish”.

Second, as people learned English, they tended to translate literally from Spanish. These translations are a special type of loanword that linguists call “calques”. Calques are everywhere in the English language.

The word “dandelion”for example, is a flower that grows in central Europe and when the Germans realized that they did not have a word for it, they looked for botany books written in Latin, in which they called it dens lionis or “dandelion”. The Germans borrowed that concept and called the flower “löwenzahn”, a literal translation of “dandelion”. The French also didn’t have a word for the flower, so they also borrowed the concept of “dandelion“, calling it as “dent de lion”. The English, who also did not have a word for this flower, heard the French term without understanding it and borrowed it, adapting “dent de lion” to English, calling it “dandelion”.

The emergence of a new jargon

Exactly that type of phenomenon is happening in Miami. As part of my ongoing research with students and colleagues about English speaking in Miami, I conducted a study with linguist Kristen D’Allessandro Merii to document Spanish-origin English calques used in South Florida.

We find several types of translations with linguistic loans. There were “literal lexical calques”, a direct translation, word for word.

For example, we find that people use expressions like “get down from the car” (get out of the car) instead of “get out of the car,” which is based on the Spanish phrase “abajar del carro.” How “go down” means “to get down”it makes sense that many Miamians think that “getting out” of a vehicle is “getting down” and not “getting out”.

Locals often also say “married with”for example: “Alex got married with José” because they are based on the Spanish expression “marry”which literally translates as “married with” instead of “married to” in passive voice. They also say “make a party” because it is a literal translation of the Spanish phrase “have a party” rather “have a party”.

Furthermore, we find “semantic tracings” or translations of meaning. In Spanish, “meat”which translates as “meat”, It can refer to both meat in general and a specific type, beef. Therefore, we discovered that when local speakers say ““meat” They specifically refer to the “beef” using phrases like “I want a meat empanada and two chicken empanadas.”

And then we find the “phonetic tracings”, or the translation of certain sounds. “Thank God” is a common phrase in Miami that comes from “Thank God”. In this case, speakers transfer the “s” at the end of “thank you” and apply it to the English form.

Those born in Miami also adopt tracings. We discovered that some expressions were typical only of the immigrant generation, for example: “throw a photo” to say “tirar una foto”, as a variation of “take a photo”.

However, other expressions were common among those born in Miami, a group that is usually bilingual but whose primary language is English.

In one experiment, we asked Miamians and people from other parts of the United States to analyze local expressions such as “married with” along with non-local versions, such as “married to”. Both groups considered the non-local versions acceptable. However, Miamians rated most local expressions more favorably than people from other places.

“Language is always changing”it is a truism, most people know that Old English is radically different from Modern English, or that the English spoken in London is different from the English of New Delhi, New York, Sydney and Cape Town, in South Africa.

But it is rare that we stop to think about how these changes occur or that we reflect on the origin of dialects and words.

“Get down from the car”like “dandelion”, It is a reminder that every word and expression has a story.

Source: AP