Although these phrases would sound strange to the rest of English-speaking Americans, they are the result of a phenomenon common in other regions of the world when two languages come into close contact, points out Angela Nicoletti, on the Florida International University blog.
“When we carry out research like this, we remember that there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ words. There are only words. And all the words come from somewhere,” said the FIU sociolinguist Phillip Carter , lead author of the study. “Every word has a story. That goes for every word spoken in Miami.”
It is not the first time, nor will it be the last time that English is nourished by words and ways of speaking from other languages. In American English and Spanish there are words that came from other leagues: “pyjamas” comes from Hindi, “gazelle” from Arabic through French and “tsunami” from Japanese.
“Language borrowings are generally gestated in the minds and discourse 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 put in contact with people who belong to different linguistic groups”, comments the linguist.
English, a language nourished by French and Spanish
To better illustrate the case, he cites the change in trajectory that the English language suffered, when in 1066, the Norman French, led by William the Conqueror, invaded England, giving rise to what is known as the Norman conquest.
The French-speaking ruling class of that time displaced the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy in influence for nearly 200 years, giving rise to the language of business being done in French. More than 10,000 loanwords from French have been documented during this time.
The same is happening in Miami, mainly as a result of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, when hundreds of thousands of Cubans left the island to settle in South Florida.
“Today, the vast majority of the population is bilingual. In 2010, more than 65% of the population in Miami-Dade County identified as Hispanic or Latino, and in the large municipalities of Doral and Hialeah that figure rises to 80 and 95%, respectively,” says the academic.
For this reason, he explains, identifying as Hispanic in the United States is not synonymous with speaking Spanish, since there are generations that have already lost almost all of the Spanish language. But in reality they have a special way of speaking English, speaking “a lot of Spanish” in the background.
With information from The Conversation