Puerto Ricans in the United States

1. Genealogy/Relatedness 

Puerto Rican Spanish (español puertorriqueño) is the Spanish language spoken in Puerto Rico. It belongs to the group of Caribbean Spanish variants.  

Andalusian Spanish (the varieties of Spanish characteristic of the southern Iberian Peninsular region surrounding Seville) became the basis for Puerto Rican Spanish since most of the settlers of Puerto Rico (and the rest of the Spanish Caribbean) came from Andalusia between the 15th and 18th centuries. The influence of Andalusian Spanish is evident in a number of phonological traits. Among these, the endings -ado, -ido, -edo often drop intervocalic /d/ in both Andalusian and Puerto Rican (i.e. Caribbean) Spanish: hablado > hablao, vendido > vendío, dedo > deo. Another Andalusian trait is the tendency to weaken postvocalic consonants, particularly /-s/: los dos > lo(h) do(h), buscar > buhcá(l).  

2. Phonetics/Phonology 

There are several noticeable phonological traits that distinguish Puerto Rican (i.e. Caribbean) Spanish from Castilian Spanish. Among them is the pronunciation phenomenon called “seseo.” In standard Castilian Spanish, the “s” sounds are pronounced more like a “th” (/θ/) when followed by an /i/ or an /e/ vowel, and a little bit like an “sh” (/ʃ/) when followed by an /a/, /o/, or /u/ vowel. Thus, in Madrid, speakers pronounce the word ciencia ‘science’ like “thienthia” and the word esos ‘those’ like “eshosh.” Andalusian/Caribbean Spanish would use an /s/ in all cases pronouncing them like “siensia” and “esos.”   

Another common feature is aspiration or elimination of the /s/ in syllable-final position of unaccented syllables. For example, las rosas ‘the roses’ would be pronounced like “la rosa” (with missing /s/ sounds after the /a/ vowels, rather than “las rosas.”   

Additionally, there is a deletion of /d/ between vowels. Castilian Spanish already weakens /d/ between vowels to the “th” sound in “then” (/ð/), such that words like lado ‘side’ are pronounced like “latho” (/laðo/). In Andalusian/Caribbean Spanish, this /ð/ sound is dropped and lado is pronounced like “la’o” (/lao/). 

Another noticeable feature is the changing of word final /n/ sounds to “ng” /ŋ/. Thus, a word such as consideran ‘they consider’, instead of being pronounced /konsiðeɾan/, is pronounced like “considerang” /konsiðeɾaŋ/.  

Finally, the shortening of words is common in Puerto Rican Spanish. For example, the two syllable Spanish words para, madre, and padre (‘for’, ‘mother,’ and ‘father’) may be pronounced by Puerto Rican Spanish speakers as  para =/pa/, madre =/mai/, and padre = /pai/ [Luna, 2010]. 

3. Morphology and Grammar 

Like Castilian Spanish, Puerto Rican Spanish has canonical subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, and overall, the morphology and grammar of Puerto Rican Spanish is similar to that of Castilian Spanish. However, there are some differences. For example, Puerto Rican (i.e. Caribbean) Spanish and Standard Iberian Spanish differ in how they form questions. In Iberian Spanish, the question word and the verb come first, and the subject pronoun is sometimes last and sometimes not there. So, “What are you saying?” comes out as ¿Qué dices tu? ‘what say you’ or ¿Qué dices? ‘what say’. In Caribbean Spanish, the pronoun comes between the question word and the verb, and comes out as ¿Qué tú dices? ‘what you say.’ In addition to this difference Puerto Rican Spanish tends to regularize the conjugation of some standard Spanish irregular verbs [Santoro, 2007].  

4. Lexicon and Vocabulary

Before arrival of Spanish settlers to Puerto Rico, the island was populated by Taíno tribes, who were an Arawak people who migrated into the Caribbean Islands from the area of present-day Venezuela around 400 BCE [Poole, 2011]. The Taíno population rapidly declined after the arrival of the Spanish, as a result of diseases brought from Europe. At the same time, there was sufficient contact between the Taino and the Spanish colonials for the latter to borrow many lexical items from the Taíno language into Puerto Rican Spanish (e.g., hamaca (‘hammock’), hurakán (‘hurricane’), and tabaco (‘tobacco’)). 

In the 16th century, the first African slaves were brought to the island. The kiKongo languages of Central Africa are thought to have had the greatest influence on Puerto Rican Spanish, with borrowed words like gandul (‘pigeon pea’), fufú (‘mashed plantains’), and malanga (‘a root vegetable’) [Lipski, 2001]. 

In 1898, after Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the United States as part of a peace treaty ending the Spanish-American War. As a US territory, between 1902 and 1948, the main language of instruction in public schools was English, which led to many American English words becoming a part of the Puerto Rican vocabulary [Beardsley, 2004].  

5. Orthography/Writing System

Puerto Rican Spanish is written using the Spanish alphabet, which is a traditional Latin alphabet with one additional letter: eñe ⟨ñ⟩, for a total of 27 letters. Although the letters ⟨k⟩ and ⟨w⟩ are part of the alphabet, they appear only in loanwords. Puerto Rican Spanish uses acute accent over any vowel ⟨á, é, í, ó, ú⟩ to mark the stress [Butt & Benjamin, 2011]. 

6. Discourse/Sociolinguistic Factors/Influences on Development/History

Spanish is the first official language of Puerto Rico, while English is the second official language. Both languages are used by the government of Puerto Rico. English is the primary language of less than 10% of the population. Spanish is the dominant language of business, education and daily life on the island, spoken by nearly 95% of the population [Muniz-Arguelles, 1988]. 

“Spanglish”  

Many Puerto Ricans are bilingual to some extent, particularly those who live in the mainland United States. Bilingualism often leads to a practice known as “code-switching” in informal conversation, where an individual will switch between languages for certain words. Code-switching among Spanish speakers in the United States is prevalent enough that it has become known as “Spanglish.” This word, however, contains many common incorrect assumptions, and therefore it has been denounced by many linguists and bilingual speakers. For example, code-switching does not necessarily mean that the individual is not proficient in either language. Rather, code switching in discourse is a choice, made according to the context and depending on the languages used by the conversation participants. Code-switching may additionally be motivated by the fact that bilingual speakers have, in their bilingual lexicon, some words which are not easily translated from one language to the other. For example, the cabro in Spanish means ‘goat’, and a cabron is technically a ‘large goat’. But cabron is vernacular Spanish means something like ‘dumbass’, and when speaking in English, a bilingual Spanish-English speaker might prefer to use the word cabron in an otherwise English sentence, since they do not mean ‘large goat’ and ‘dumbass’ might be a little too offensive. Thus, code switching often provides individuals with ways to better express their intended meanings, than if they had to rely on one language [Dumitrescu, 2012; Heredia & Altarriba, 2001]. 

“Spanglish” is not a dialect or language of its own. Code-switching does tend to follow some rules. For example, noun-adjective order must follow the rules of the language of the adjective. In English, adjectives typically come before the noun, and in Spanish they come after. Accordingly, we get rich soup in English, but sopa rica in Spanish. In a code switching situation, a “Spanglish” speaker might say rich sopa or soup rica, but neither sopa rich nor rica soup. These rules, while regular and interesting, are not sufficient to have code-switched English-Spanish count as its own dialect or language.   

“Spanglish”-type code switching has also been pointed to when Puerto Rican Spanish speakers were arguing for independence, since for many Puerto Ricans the use of “Spanglish” was held up as evidence that English influence was destroying proper Spanish in Puerto Rico. Conversely, some thought that “Spanglish” was a barrier to Puerto Rican assimilation in the United States. Scholars have pointed out, however, that most code-switchers simply use the practice for ease of informal communication and are fluent in one or both languages. Nevertheless, bilingualism is an important part of the identity of many Puerto Ricans living in the mainland United States [Dumitrescu, 2012; Heredia & Altarriba, 2001].