New York Latino English, sometimes called Nuyorican English, is a form of New York dialect. It originated with the post war Puerto Rican immigration to New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 and particularly the subsequent generations born in the New York dialect region who were native speakers of both English and Spanish. However, it is now the customary dialect of many Hispanic

Hispanic

Hispanic is a term that originally denoted a relationship to Hispania, which is to say the Iberian Peninsula: Andorra, Gibraltar, Portugal and Spain. During the Modern Era, Hispanic sometimes takes on a more limited meaning, particularly in the United States, where the term means a person of ...

-Americans of diverse national heritages in the New York metropolitan area United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, Therefore, terms like Nuyorican English and the related term Puerto Rican English are now misnomers.

The dialect shows influence of New York European American

European American

A European American is a citizen or resident of the United States who has origins in any of the original peoples of Europe...

 English and contact with Spanish. Importantly, this is a native variety of English, not learner English or interlanguage

Interlanguage

An interlanguage is an emerging linguistic system that has been developed by a learner of a second language who has not become fully proficient yet but is approximating the target language: preserving some features of their first language , or overgeneralizing target language rules in speaking or...

. It is sometimes spoken by people who know little or no Spanish. A few characteristics include:

• The rhythm tends to be syllable-timed
  Timing (linguistics)
  Isochrony is the postulated rhythmic division of time into equal portions by a language. Isochrony is one of the three aspects of prosody, the others being intonation and stress.Three alternative ways in which a language can divide time are postulated:...
  
  , meaning syllables take up roughly the same amount of time with roughly the same amount of stress. Standard American English is stress-timed
  Timing (linguistics)
  Isochrony is the postulated rhythmic division of time into equal portions by a language. Isochrony is one of the three aspects of prosody, the others being intonation and stress.Three alternative ways in which a language can divide time are postulated:...
  
  , meaning that only stressed syllables are evenly timed. Most Romance languages
  Romance languages
  The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
  
   (of which Spanish is a member) are syllable-timed.
• /t/ and /d/ is realized as dental stops [t̪] and [d̪] rather than the standard American and AAVE alveolars [t] and [d] (also found in many Romance languages, including Spanish). Dentalization is also common in New York European American dialect.
• Devoicing of voiced obstruent codas (e.g., characterize may be realized with a final [s])
• Consonant cluster simplifications such as the loss of dental stops after nasals (e.g., bent) and fricatives, (e.g., left, test). This leads to a characteristic plural, in which words like tests are pronounced [t̪ɛst̪ɪs], sometimes written as testes.
• /l/ onsets are clear, unlike those of most other New Yorkers or General American English
• Lack of inversion or do support particularly in first and second person questions (I can go to the bathroom?)
• Calque
  Calque
  In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation.-Calque:...
  
  s and direct translations of Spanish expressions and words (e.g., owned by the devil, instead of possessed by the devil, closed meaning locked. after coronals is not fronted as in New York European American varieties.
• Pronunciation is predominantly non-rhotic
  Rhotic and non-rhotic accents
  English pronunciation can be divided into two main accent groups: a rhotic speaker pronounces a rhotic consonant in words like hard; a non-rhotic speaker does not...
  
  . The vernacular tends to be non-rhotic, and cultivated forms rhotic, as in AAVE and some European American varieties.

It is possible to differentiate this variety from an interlanguage

Interlanguage

An interlanguage is an emerging linguistic system that has been developed by a learner of a second language who has not become fully proficient yet but is approximating the target language: preserving some features of their first language , or overgeneralizing target language rules in speaking or...

 spoken by second language speakers in that NYLE does not generally display the following features:

• There are no confusions of tense and lax vowels, outside contexts where other native speakers often vary usage.
• There is no addition of /ɛ/ before initial consonant clusters with /s/.
• Speakers do not confuse of /dʒ/ with /j/, (e.g., Yale with jail).

In some movies American street thugs, including non-Latino ones, may use NYLE features or other features of other Latino English varieties. As result, some people may inaccurately associate NYLE with delinquent street culture.

External links

• The New York Latino English Project The site of the New York Latino English project, which studies the native English spoken by New York Latinos.