Puerto Rican accents
Encyclopedia
Puerto Rican accents, both in Spanish
and English language
, could be described as a reflection of Puerto Rico
's culture.
To understand the concept of the Puerto Rican accent in Spanish, one must remember that every country in Latin America
has different accents in this language, many of which are very similar. The Argentine
and Uruguay
an accents, for example, were heavily influenced by the presence of Italians
in those countries. Brazil
ians, with Portuguese
as their native language, have an accent in Spanish that is strongly influenced by their Portuguese
background.
In Puerto Rico's case, Spaniards
arrived from many regions within Spain and brought with them their own regional dialects/accents. However, the great majority of European immigrants to Puerto Rico throughout its history came from the Hispano-Arabic area of Spain known as Andalusia
. Another great majority arrived from North Africa, most notably the Canary Islands
. When visiting Tenerife or Las Palmas (Islas Canarias, Spain), Puerto Ricans are usually taken at first hearing for fellow-Canarians from a distant part of the Canary archipelago. It is the accents of these regions which served as the basis of the style of Spanish spoken in Puerto Rico.
Arawak indigenous culture (in Puerto Rico, specifically that of the Taíno
Amerindian), though destroyed by Spanish slave owners, survived through its miscegenated descendants and, as the first fusion of a non-European language to Spanish, became the major tying force which brought together all the other cultural contributions which would soon come. The Arawak language, Lokono, has left behind thousands of words. It has added to Puerto Rican Spanish the pleasant speaking tone which is often said to roll off the tongue like a song.
Africans in Puerto Rico were brought in as slave labor, the majority for work on coastal or lowland sugar plantations. They contributed hundreds of words, colloquialisms, intonations, and rhythm.
Chinese Puerto Ricans and other Asia
ns that have established themselves in Puerto Rico also adopt the accent, but also keep a tinge of an east Asian accent.
The Puerto Rican accent is very strikingly similar to the accents used by those from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean basin, including: Cuba
and the Dominican Republic
and those from the Caribbean/coastal regions of Venezuela
, Colombia
, Panama
, Honduras
, and Nicaragua
(particularly to a non-Puerto Rican). It also continues to be similar to the accent of the Canary Islanders and Andalusians in southern Spain. However, many Puerto Ricans find a great distinction between their accent and other Caribbean accents.
Aspiration or elimination of the /s/
Elimination of /d/ between vowels
Elimination of /d/ at the end of a word
Change of /r/ to /x/
Change of /r/ to /l/
Shortening of words
The accent of post-first generation Puerto Rican migrants to the U.S. is heavily influenced by their predominantly English-speaking surroundings. While still sounding Puerto Rican, their accents are tinged by the area of the United States where they grew up. Their grammatical composition is sometimes influenced by American English rather than Spanish.
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
and English language
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, could be described as a reflection of Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is an unincorporated territory of the United States, located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of both the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.Puerto Rico comprises an...
's culture.
To understand the concept of the Puerto Rican accent in Spanish, one must remember that every country in Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
has different accents in this language, many of which are very similar. The Argentine
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
and Uruguay
Uruguay
Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...
an accents, for example, were heavily influenced by the presence of Italians
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
in those countries. Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
ians, with Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
as their native language, have an accent in Spanish that is strongly influenced by their Portuguese
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
background.
In Puerto Rico's case, Spaniards
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
arrived from many regions within Spain and brought with them their own regional dialects/accents. However, the great majority of European immigrants to Puerto Rico throughout its history came from the Hispano-Arabic area of Spain known as Andalusia
Andalusia
Andalusia is the most populous and the second largest in area of the autonomous communities of Spain. The Andalusian autonomous community is officially recognised as a nationality of Spain. The territory is divided into eight provinces: Huelva, Seville, Cádiz, Córdoba, Málaga, Jaén, Granada and...
. Another great majority arrived from North Africa, most notably the Canary Islands
Canary Islands
The Canary Islands , also known as the Canaries , is a Spanish archipelago located just off the northwest coast of mainland Africa, 100 km west of the border between Morocco and the Western Sahara. The Canaries are a Spanish autonomous community and an outermost region of the European Union...
. When visiting Tenerife or Las Palmas (Islas Canarias, Spain), Puerto Ricans are usually taken at first hearing for fellow-Canarians from a distant part of the Canary archipelago. It is the accents of these regions which served as the basis of the style of Spanish spoken in Puerto Rico.
Arawak indigenous culture (in Puerto Rico, specifically that of the Taíno
Taíno people
The Taínos were pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Bahamas, Greater Antilles, and the northern Lesser Antilles. It is thought that the seafaring Taínos are relatives of the Arawak people of South America...
Amerindian), though destroyed by Spanish slave owners, survived through its miscegenated descendants and, as the first fusion of a non-European language to Spanish, became the major tying force which brought together all the other cultural contributions which would soon come. The Arawak language, Lokono, has left behind thousands of words. It has added to Puerto Rican Spanish the pleasant speaking tone which is often said to roll off the tongue like a song.
Africans in Puerto Rico were brought in as slave labor, the majority for work on coastal or lowland sugar plantations. They contributed hundreds of words, colloquialisms, intonations, and rhythm.
Chinese Puerto Ricans and other Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
ns that have established themselves in Puerto Rico also adopt the accent, but also keep a tinge of an east Asian accent.
The Puerto Rican accent is very strikingly similar to the accents used by those from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean basin, including: Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
and the Dominican Republic
Dominican Republic
The Dominican Republic is a nation on the island of La Hispaniola, part of the Greater Antilles archipelago in the Caribbean region. The western third of the island is occupied by the nation of Haiti, making Hispaniola one of two Caribbean islands that are shared by two countries...
and those from the Caribbean/coastal regions of Venezuela
Venezuela
Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...
, Colombia
Colombia
Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...
, Panama
Panama
Panama , officially the Republic of Panama , is the southernmost country of Central America. Situated on the isthmus connecting North and South America, it is bordered by Costa Rica to the northwest, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. The...
, Honduras
Honduras
Honduras is a republic in Central America. It was previously known as Spanish Honduras to differentiate it from British Honduras, which became the modern-day state of Belize...
, and Nicaragua
Nicaragua
Nicaragua is the largest country in the Central American American isthmus, bordered by Honduras to the north and Costa Rica to the south. The country is situated between 11 and 14 degrees north of the Equator in the Northern Hemisphere, which places it entirely within the tropics. The Pacific Ocean...
(particularly to a non-Puerto Rican). It also continues to be similar to the accent of the Canary Islanders and Andalusians in southern Spain. However, many Puerto Ricans find a great distinction between their accent and other Caribbean accents.
Features of the Puerto Rican accent in spoken Spanish
Seseo- This refers to pronouncing as /s/ the sound written
or (when soft; that is, followed by an or an ) like most other Latin-American accents, whereas in Europe /θ/ is used. Examples: is /saˈpato/, not /θaˈpato/; and is /aˈsul/ not /aˈθul/.
Aspiration or elimination of the /s/
- This usually occurs before a consonant or at the end of a word, /s/ is debuccalized to [h] or eliminated altogether. Examples include [las muˈxeɾeh] instead of [las muˈxeɾes] (las mujeres, 'the women') [loh ðoh] instead of [los ðos] (los dos, 'the two'). This is also common in other Caribbean basin Spanish-speaking countries.
Elimination of /d/ between vowels
- This usually happens usually near the end of a word. Examples include [ehˈtao] instead of [esˈtaðo] (estado, 'state'), and [ˈto.o] instead of [ˈtoðo] ('all').
Elimination of /d/ at the end of a word
- In this case, a stress is usually placed on the final vowel. Examples include [päˈre] instead of [päˈreð] (pared, 'wall') and [mäˈðɾi] instead of [mäˈðɾið] (MadridMadridMadrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
).
Change of /r/ to /x/
- Many rural Puerto Ricans do not roll their tongues on the double "r" sound in words (ex. "arroz" or "carro"), making it sound like the Scottish loch. This is a characteristic associated most closely with the area around PoncePonce, Puerto RicoPonce is both a city and a municipality in the southern part of Puerto Rico. The city is the seat of the municipal government.The city of Ponce, the fourth most populated in Puerto Rico, and the most populated outside of the San Juan metropolitan area, is named for Juan Ponce de León y Loayza, the...
(when a person drags their r's, they are automatically catalogued as ponceños, or a citizen of Ponce or any country area of Puerto Rico).
Change of /r/ to /l/
- The /r/ that comes before a /d/ is often changed to an /l/, so that words like "perdón" (forgiveness) and "verdad" (truth) become "peldón" and "velda" respectively.
Shortening of words
- Puerto Ricans also often shorten words by eliminating whole syllables. A good example are the words para, madre, and padre ("for", "mother", and "father"): Puerto Ricans may pronounce para as /pa/, madre as /mai/, and padre as /pai/.
U.S.-Puerto Rican accent in Spanish
U.S.-resident Puerto Ricans, descended from the large number of migrants who left the island throughout the 20th Century, can be found today en masse along the Eastern coast of the United States. In addition to major metropolitan areas such as New York, many Puerto Ricans also migrated to areas such as Chicago, Florida, Boston, and even California. Because of their high-rates of military enlistment, large Puerto Rican populations are also found in isolated spots across the U.S. near military installations.The accent of post-first generation Puerto Rican migrants to the U.S. is heavily influenced by their predominantly English-speaking surroundings. While still sounding Puerto Rican, their accents are tinged by the area of the United States where they grew up. Their grammatical composition is sometimes influenced by American English rather than Spanish.