Dominican Spanish
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Dominican Spanish is Castilian Spanish as spoken in the Dominican Republic on the island of Hispaniola (Española in Spanish) and throughout the Dominican diaspora (mostly in New York and Miami). It is similar to Puerto Rican Spanish, Cuban Spanish and Venezuelan Spanish.
[edit] Phonology
- Like many other dialects, Dominican Spanish features yeísmo: the sounds represented by ll (the palatal lateral /ʎ/) and y (historically the palatal approximant /j/) have fused into one. This merged phoneme is generally pronounced as a y [j] or j [dʒ] (these are the sounds in English yellow and 'judge. That is, in the Dominican Republic, se cayó "he fell down" is homophonous with se calló "he became silent".
- The fricatives /s/ have a tendency to become an indistinct aspiration or disappear or to become (a voiceless glottal fricative, /h/) at the end of syllables. This 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 [lah'mesah sɔn 'blankah], but in las águilas azules "the blue eagles", syllable-final /s/ in las and águilas might experience liaison with the initial vowels of the following words and remain [s] (/la'sagila sa'sulɛh/), or become [h] (the exact pronunciation is largely an individual choice).
- In some areas, speakers tend to drop the final r sound in verb infinitives. This elision is considered a feature of uneducated speakers in some places, but it is widespread in others, at least in rapid speech.
- The weak r, final or not, tends to be changed in many words by an i sound in the Northerly Cibao region and by Ls in the Eastern and capital city (Santo Domingo), i.e., the verb correr (to run) is pronounced correi and correl, respectively; perdón (forgiveness): peidón and peldón. This substitution for i is delicately (almost mutely) present in Andalusian Spanish, and the L use is prototypical, and more marked, in Puerto Rican Spanish, and is believed to be of African origin.
- In the Southwestern region, the L sound is usually emphasized so much that it turns into an r, with the classical example being maldito (damned) turned into mardito.
- The creation of diphtongs in everyday speech is common, like the phonetic contraction of "voy a" into "vuá" or "voá", or "¿para adónde vas?" into "¿p'ónde va'?". Another great example of strong contraction is the following phrase: "Taco 'tá 'co'ta'o", from "Taco está acostado" ("Taco is lying down").
- Almost exclusively Dominican in use, is the incorrect grammatical placement of the second person singular pronoun of tú before the verb in the question form: "¿Cómo tú estás?" instead of the correct "¿Cómo estás tú?". This mistake, nonetheless, is not made when using the more formal usted, instead of tú, where the correct grammatical order is used.
Other differences with "standard" Castilian include subtleties like hypercorrection. Nevertheless, speakers of the Dominican variant of Castilian Spanish usually have no trouble understanding speakers of other Castilian dialects or visa versa.
Anglicisms (due to cultural and commercial influence from the U.S.) are extremely common in Dominican Spanish, more so than in any other Spanish variant, save for Puerto Rican and maybe Northern Mexican.
The Dominican variant of Castilian may be related to that of Andalusian Spanish and Canary Island Spanish.
