Linguists have identified a new English dialect that’s emerging in South Florida
theconversation.com
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We kind of do this already in mainline English, switching between Germanic, French, Latin and Greek based on some unwritten rules. Adding Spanish wouldn’t really change things that much considering its close relatives French and Latin are already so well represented. Though I’m sure the Spanish part is more dominant in this dialect than it would be eventually in the broader language.
It's using "troca" ("trucka"?) instead of "camioneta" when referring to "truck".
Another example is "parkear" instead of "estacionar" when referring to "parking".
This is in the case of the Mexican dialect of Spanglish.
Some Americans learning Japanese will regret this last part- wishing that the language stayed “pure”, as if it were ever actually pure, whatever that means.
Every language is like this.
Japanese has three forms of writing: Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana.
Kanji, which stands for "Han Language/Characters", was imported from China; "Kan" is the Japanese reading of "Han". It's used more or less as when it was imported and is largely interchangable with Traditional Chinese.
Hiragana originated as a simplification of cursive Kanji, because people both today and from a few millenia ago find Kanji too complicated to deal with at times. Its name means "Simplified Kana", in contrast to Kanji.
Hiragana is used to accent Kanji and connect sentences together for better flow and comprehension (known as Okurigana), can be used by itself (sometimes in place of Kanji, especially for childrens writing), and is sometimes used to convey an image of cuteness ("kawaii") and femininity due to its curvy styling. Pronunciation guides for Kanji (known as Furigana), if present, are also written with Hiragana.
Katakana similarly originated as a simplification of Kanji, though its styling is more straight than Hiragana to enable easier writing with instruments besides brushes or pens on paper (eg: engraving in wood or stone). Its name means "Partial Kana", signifying that it's derived from the parts of Kanji characters.
Katakana is used today to write foreign words, scientific names (including Japanese ones), and certain Japanese names such as those of businesses. It's also used to give emphasis, like how bold or italic styling or all caps is used in English. In times past, Katakana was also used instead of Hiragana to accent and connect sentences.
Both Hiragana and Katakana have respective characters in their alphabets and phonetically can be interchanged character for character.
The common modern day understanding that Katakana "is for foreign words" is merely just one of its use cases.
Such as in the printed copy of Emperor Hirohito's speech announcing the surrender of Japan in 1945 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ImperialSurrenderRescript...
I have wished for consistency in every language I have ever learned or tried to learn, which I suspect is what "pure" would mean in this context. Imported words often use different roots and conjugate inconsistently, which makes it harder to remember and use them. (Though of course, as sibling comments point out, any living language will import from other languages; the only escape is in conlangs... but if you actually used those they'd get the same difficulty:])
Provided the term is meant to apply to the Spanish spoken by immigrants and/or border area residents in the US.
Maybe you meant "parar" or "detener" (to stop), that don't clarify by them self if the engine has to be stopped or not (usually is the whole sentence what clarifies that)
[0]: https://www.fundeu.es/recomendacion/aparcarestacionarparquea...
Imported vocabulary/borrowed words simply describes loanwords that make it into the common lexicon of speakers of the receiving language but not necessarily speakers of the donor language.
There is a distinction, however, that not all words that are used via code-switching are going to become part of common enough vernacular that it would become accepted within a language, and likewise, there may be cases where loanwords do not enter a language via speakers that code-switch it into their daily vocabulary.
But kindergarten is imported the whole world over. You can't say you know German based on that. Code-switchers understand the grammar of both languages, not just a few words.
I do think the Normans entering England, or Germanic peoples mixing with Celts, or Celts being conquered by Romans for a brief time -- all of that probably produced code switchers in their moment in time, with lasting impact to our vocabular and grammar. But it's not code switching anymore. It's modern English now.
Similar things happened in Spain with Celts, Romans, Arabs, Goths, Basques... Not to mention all the regional Romance languages that survive today (Galician, Catalan). They conquered the Americas and got some infusion of that vocabulary too. Castilian borrows vocabulary from all of these. But monolingual Castilian speakers do not "code switch".
You also know a little bit of Indian language you yogurt guru.
You don't have to be aware you're using words from other languages to be speaking words from other languages.
Adiós amigo.
When the first person used "hotel" in an English sentence, they were struggling to find a suitable word and failed, and fell back to another language for it. Or possibly they thought it was a better word than the English equivalent for some reason. They thought of it as a French word, with all the implications of it in French, rather than English.
When I use "hotel" in a sentence, it's just part of the language I grew up with. To me, it's an English word, not something I fell back on in another language.
That said, the "Spanglish" referenced here is being learned from birth by people, so they aren't context switching either. They're just speaking how they learned to speak. Older people are probably still context switching, but younger people likely aren't.
Borrowing might have started out as code switching, or something else, but when you use words borrowed a long time ago from Y in language X, people who know X but not necessarily Y will probably understand you. There are of course technical terms that you might use which not everyone will understand. Some of these will have been borrowed from another language, like electron or perigee or perihelion, while others might be words made up and not borrowed, like quark or boson or fermion. The fact that some were borrowed, and others not, does not make the one code switching and the other something else.
And if you're code switching, you'll probably be pronouncing the words from language Y with the expected pronunciation of Y, whereas if you're using words borrowed from Y into X, they will probably be pronounced differently from how they would be pronounced if you were code switching into Y (or just speaking Y), and the semantics may have changed. Take the word 'mesa' in English, describing a flat-topped hill in the southwest. If you're a non-Spanish speaker, you'll probably pronounce that last vowel as a schwa, and only have the flat-topped hill meaning in mind. Whereas if you code switched into Spanish, that last vowel would probably sound like the /a/ in 'father', and you might be talking about a table.
"Alpha and Omega" as used in English is a biblical reference, does not really have much to do with practical knowledge of Greek.
Du jour would be understood on a restaurant menu for soup more than anything else.
The alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. It's the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, and a Biblical reference to the Almighty. And then du jour means "of the day".
Your point about "genetically french" is also wrong in almost exactly the same way so it provides an illustrative comparison. There's no single french ethnicity, just people who are french and some observable trends. Someone is french who has french citizenship, a word is english when it is widely spoken by native english speakers.
I also need to point out that this is not a matter of opinion. Linguistics is an established field and consensus is clear on this. You are confidently asserting things that are well outside the mainstream of the science.
There are absolutely genetic groupings of people. Any geneticist will tell you so. You can learn more here. https://medium.com/nautilus-magazine/what-both-the-left-and-...
Adiós amigo.
However this word is part of the English lexicon today and require no knowledge of French, and as such isn't an example of code switching
Challenge accepted: "The stoic young man bid us au revoir and left"
The thing is, English borrows so much from other languages that it's not apparent to English speakers that the words are from other languages.
...
et cetera (etc)
id est (i.e.)
videlicet (viz)
sic
and that's just Latin.
Think about Schadenfreud, Bon appétit, Au revoir, Macho, Amigo, Kindergarten, Uber, Gesundheit, Smorgasbord, Apartheid, Trek...
Honestly, the list goes on and on and on. English speakers use more "borrowed" phrases and words than any other language I can think of.
I won't actually consider these wholesale expression borrowings part of English until they spread to English speakers who don't speak the borrowed language.
It's really noticeable for me because when speaking English I've subconsciously adopted a British accent, but when using English loan words in German I'll automatically pronounce them in a very German way.
Oh, I'm not sure about that. I say "Kaffay", that is I anglicise the French pronunciation, even though I have a reasonable French accent. But many English people pronounce it as "Kaff".
That should be "Über", really, shouldn't it?
I don't know, I've never used the service, but the vowel-sound "Ü" doesn't occur in native English. I guess most people just say "Oober" and be done with it. To me, "Über" looks like a foreign word, not an import. In English, I think it's used only as a brand-name, and as part of the word "Übermensch", a term associated with a particular philosophy book.
In German, the german word "über": [ˈyːbɐ]
In German, the company "Uber": ['uːbə]
In English, the company "Uber": [ˈjuːbə]
As made famous by "the trouble with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur", attributed to GWB.
What you do is using phrases and words that you learned without speaking the language they're borrowed from. Sometimes borrowing words even limits the meaning, when you say "Gesundheit" you don't mean the general concept of health, you mean "bless you". If I asked you to translate et cetera you would probably not be able to unless you spoke Latin.
Edit: That was such an eureka moment I feel like it should be something of a cliché.
QED (Quod erat demonstrandum)
I caused a similar confusion with my phone. When I switch my phone from English to my native language I don't understand the menus anymore, and the translations sound ridiculous.
I've lived most my life in very multi-lingual cities and neighborhoods, and it always struck me how some English very expressive short phrases, eg. "Like, no way", were used in other language conversations. Always thought, it was the relative brevity and ubiquity, in the way "C'est la vie" was for awhile in English.
Brevity of phrase is part of it, but it doesn't seem to happen in conversational tones- usually either when someone is showing off or as an interjection of sorts.
Portugal's is pretty decent, though the format runs two hours per episode. I also thought the Croation version (Direktor Svemira) was decent, though the individual cast members lean hard into their own stereotypes (Lidija as the personification of the male gaze, for example).
Sweden's is really popular, but I personally didn't care for it at all.
As with the US version, it's probably best to pretend that Spain and Belgium's didn't happen.
I'll have to track those down. Two hours per episode for Portugal's sounds _wild_, I'm interested to see how that goes.
Given that the phenomenon happens in all languages, especially where linguistic regions meet, you would find usage influenced by
* brevity of pronunciation (e.g. “chic”, “déjà-vu”)
* preference for local coinage and accent
* dominant regional usage (e.g. computer and automotive terminology)
* *prestige* (e.g. historical EN borrowings from FR, especially for food; computer terminology; “je ne sais quoi”)
* humour, sarcasm (e.g. in Quebec, the term *bloke* is used by FR speakers to refer to EN speakers)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching
> In linguistics, code-switching or language alternation occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation or situation. Code-switching is different from plurilingualism in that plurilingualism refers to the ability of an individual to use multiple languages,[1] while code-switching is the act of using multiple languages together.
The whole rest of the article is the result of linguists studying it.
Elsewhere in this same thread, someone was assuming the sociological cause for Spanglish, instead of the more organic linguistic cause that happens anywhere you have two cultures and languages in close contact. I suspect this blurred definition makes talking about this more complicated now, since sociological code-switching has become part of America's racialized sociology discussion.
If I had my druthers I'd split those two very different phenomena into separate terms, because they don't even produce the same kinds of linguistic patterns.
(Thanks for asking me to justify, my assumption was quite wrong regarding the scope of the term.)
Isn't that register-switching?
It gets confusing in English, because the classier registers in English involves the use of more words of French, Latin or Greek origin, the less-classy registers rely more on anglo-saxon words.
https://multilingual.com/articles/portunol-blending-spanish-...
I realized this specific one is a bit controversial while searching for it, here is something I found on the website of the Government of Canada about it: https://www.noslangues-ourlanguages.gc.ca/fr/chroniques-de-l...
She can hear it and knows it but can't help it at all.
The result of this is that a few of my friends and I have very similar sounding accents despite our families being from other ends of the country and having very different 'default' accents; it's entirely down to our respective mothers telling us to 'speak properly' every time we'd drop our Ts or show other 'common' habits of speech as kids!
Though I notice it in myself very prominently, I think everyone is prone to this kind of mirroring behavior to some extent, and I could easily see someone living in a new region for a while developing a new accent that doesn't sound quite like the one they came to the region with.
Don’t you think it’s weird to ascribe hidden meanings to someone’s words?
I'm getting from your reply here that you completely understood my original comment, meaning your comment to me asking about it was simply to provoke this conversation, not to actually talk about my point. Which is interesting, because I'm really interested (some may say eSPECIALy interested) in this topic, and would happily talk to you about it, had your original question been this message instead.
I'm also willing to concede that the autism diagnosis and acceptance is still really new for me, so I'm going through the phase of putting back together who I was and dealing with the fact that a lot of things that I've blamed myself for, for literally years, were simply because of this condition, and that some of my coping mechanisms have in fact been making me worse for a long time. It's weird to re-learn who you are as a person at 32 years old after having felt so sure of it for so long.
Which is what I think leads to these overly long explanations. I've been so misunderstood for so long that I'm literally afraid of it happening now.
What you describe in this comment is the exact same thing I’ve heard from my co-worker about this topic, however. She said it’s a relief to be able to attribute a lot of the things she has seemingly struggled with in the past to the new diagnoses she’s got.
I agree with your co-worker, it is a massive relief to know these issues aren't fundamental flaws of your character, but behaviors attributable to a condition that can be managed, accounted for, and worked around.
The burnout and stress you feel before diagnosis/acceptance is intense, and, for some of us, debilitating. I have been remarkably fortunate to have a job with co-workers who have enough compassion and understanding to let me be honest about how I'm feeling, and understanding that what I feel is valid, though not always correct or in alignment with my logical thoughts. It's been complicated and involved a lot of boundary setting and apologies when I still fail, but that's all gotten easier since I just _know why_.
I can distinguish the differences between many southern accents, to the point where I could pinpoint a speaker with roots in Georgia/Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, SC, NC, Texas, etc with pretty good accuracy. Others not from the south would tend to lump a lot of them together as a “southern” accent where I see lots of differences and distinctions. Cadence and “y’all” is sometimes the only real commonality among the region.
Post-Norman-invasion English more-or-less came from a such a hybrid that switched multiple times per sentence between bastardised French and older English.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Old_N...
History is rarely simple though! The Normans themselves were a hybrid of Viking settlers and locals. So it's likely that quite a few of those French words we absorbed into English have Old Norse roots.
The dialect has words too such as, “ta” (thanks). It’s similar to the Danish word, “tak”.
Creole languages are more about "20 people speaking 20 different languages create a new common merged language", spanglish sound more like "20k bilinguals with varying preference between the 2 languages mix and match the 2 languages for convenience".
This assuming that most spanglish speakers could hold a conversation in either languages.
If you can provide an example of such a diverse set of languages becoming a new language, that would be interesting.
Creole has nothing to do with the number of languages. Creole is what you get when two groups of people with no bilingual speakers are forced to interact and develop a new language. Normally, it starts as a pidgin to facilitate trade but then develops into a full fledged language. The main difference with Spanglish being that the speakers often know both languages to a modest degree but probably would not be considered native by other native speakers. Also, there are almost 1M Dominicans alone in NYC. 20k makes it sound like some cute phenomena happening in Little Havana in Miami.
I agree, I was misremembering. After a quick refresher I agree that spanglish fits the Creole definition much better than I initially considered.
> there are almost 1M Dominicans alone in NYC
Not all 1M people interact with each other, I was talking about the overlapping sets of social circles areound people, not the total count.
Spanglish is not a creole or dialect of Spanish because, though people claim they are native Spanglish speakers, Spanglish itself is not a language on its own, but speakers speak English or Spanish with a heavy influence from the other language. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanglish)
It's certainly not 20 languages, but Singlish (Singapore creole) has a number of influences.
That phenomenon in general is well studied: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching
GP means rules, a grammar of sorts, for which words are English and which words are Spanish in the same sentence. Switching without pause, talking to the same person in the same setting.
I don't think the blended languages like Spanglish and Hinglish are considered pidgins or creoles within linguistics, but I could see room for argument on that.
There are studies of this. It's best to search in Google scholar to filter out (some of) the crap:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Miam...
The majority of the work focuses on sociolinguistic aspects of Spanglish, but there are also grammatical investigations. Here's an example dissertation that cites some other studies along the same lines:
https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
The example quoted is exactly the sort of thing that's not going on.
And where's the threshold for calling people bilingual? If you say "get down from the car," you're (likely) using that phrase only to people outside your environment. It's lack of fluency.
> “Thanks God,” a type of loan translation from “gracias a Dios,” is common in Miami. In this case, speakers analogize the “s” sound at the end of “gracias” and apply it to the English form.
That's just an assumption of the "mmm, let me think 2 seconds" kind.
The writer also calls it Spanish, but e.g. beef is "ternera" in Spanish. It might be Cuban Spanish, which has a fairly large vocabulary that differs from other Spanish variants.
^^^ this is kinda weird considering Cuban Spanish omits the S (and often half the rest of the letters in any given sentence, lol, at least to my lower intermediate Spanish ears), resulting in "Gracia Dio"
By the way I had a coworker who was a native Arabic speaker say "thanks God" a lot. I think "thank God" is a phrasing that throws off a lot of people learning English, from multiple language backgrounds.
Fluency doesn't mean you never make such mistakes, and it also doesn't prevent you picking up unusual phrasing from your environment, even when it might have originated as a mistake. In a heavily German but English-speaking workplace, it's not just the Germans who use “until” to mean “by”.
You are discovering the difference between castellano and español; in addition to ternera, it's bife in some parts of South America.
The Spanish Royal Academy makes it clear: https://www.rae.es/dpd/espa%C3%B1ol
Some Latin Americans will call their language Castellano. Then my guess—since one can only guess what the hell people mean—was that this has something to do with the difference between Spanish from Spain and Spanish from whatever Latin American country. (But who knows?)
Furthermore, you’ll see that the original context was Cuban Spanish versus whatever “Spanish” without any adjective means. Do you really think that your little pet peeve about the intra-politics of Spanish languages are relevant in this context? People weren’t talking about the differences between Catalan and Spanish!
> The Spanish Royal Academy makes it clear: https://www.rae.es/dpd/espa%C3%B1ol
Since you’re so sensitive to minority languages and whatnot, maybe you’ll understand that “settlers” might have their own words that might deviate from an Academy based in Spain.
It's dictionary has nearly every Spanish term registered, no matter which side of the Atlantic you choose.
RAE doesn't dictate which dialect of the Spanish it's the "correct" one. Every Spanish language subdialect it's the correct one.
For instance, the spelling of z/c before a-o-u/e-i as either /s/ or /th/ depends on the dialect you choose. https://dle.rae.es/c
To counter-point your claims, there are a myriad of dialects of Spanish inside Spain. Some of them even are similar to the ones used in Hispanic-America.
I'm not talking about the other languages of Spain: Aragonese, Asturian, Basque, Catalan, Galician, Valencian, Extremaduran, etc. I'm only talking about the language that is official in all Spain, Spanish (and its dialects).
In other words, “Español”could be thought of as a group of Spanish languages with “Castellano” being a distinct language within that group.
They all come from Vulgar Latin and depending on how you split it but Portuguese and Gallego come from a common ancestor and one has an easier time understanding Gallego if one speaks Portuguese than if one speaks only Spanish and Catalan would be a post until itself once we start discussing Occitan and Valencian, but it’s also not descended from Spanish (Gallo-Romance)
TLDR I really wish people would stop according Castellano as an official language and a bunch of languages that are as older or older than Castellano as some dialect descending from Castellano.
Castellano is the official language of the Spanish government from eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Spanish_Academy and of course decades of repression of regional languages under eg the Franco regime. I don’t mean official as in “the true language” I mean official as in “the Spanish government/regime/royal dialect for centuries”. To the point many people as you mention equate Castellano with “Spanish” which is just not true - I agree with you
Maybe I am misunderstanding your comment but it's not me that is making Castillian "official" - I think it's bullshit that other Spanish languages aren't treated with more respect it's - the historical reality that it was accorded official status due to the political dominance of Castile and consequently the use of Castillian as a common tongue
I speak Spanish but I'm not Castilian and has no relationship with those two regions (Castile-Leon and Castile-La Mancha).
Are you sure?
> There are multiple dialects/languages (eg Gallego, Catalan) spoken in Spain that aren’t really common in the new world, the new world dialects are mostly based on the Castilian (castellano) dialect which was and is the prestige/official Spanish dialect promoted by the government and which settlers likely had in common.
Let’s see if e.g. Catalan is really relevant here.
It clearly is not. Why? The original commenter brought up the supposed differences between “castellano” and “español” in the context of Cuban Spanish. The minority languages of Spain are completely irrelvant here.
There are places in Latin America where they call their Spanish “castellano” (in Spanish). While other places call it “español”. And in that context they do just mean “Spanish”, since they have no reason to care about the minority languages of Spain.
So my shot in the dark guess was that the original commenter meant to refer to the difference between Spanish spoken in Spain and Spanish spoken in Latin America.
Ultimately the fun part of talking about languages is that no matter how much one person might believe that their terms are clear and unambiguous, if the community of speakers is large enough, you are bound to find competing meanings either way.
Beef is "res" or sometimes "carne" as the article mentions, "ternera" is specifically the young calf's meat.
but "carne de cerdo" means pork meat, so it depends on the context and spanish variation
Here in the UK every region speaks English differently. Sure, there's a kind of "standard" English spoken on TV, but the further you get from London the less it's spoken. It's not just a question of accents and local words for things, but of sentence structure too - for instance the Scots dialect has quite radically different ways of saying things than "standard" English.
The people who speak Scots are completely fluent in their local dialect. Just because the language they speak doesn't happen to correspond with the culturally dominant variant doesn't make them wrong.
SSE features unique words ("The word 'outwith' is not used outwith Scotland") and constructions (a waiter will ask "What are you wanting?" instead of "What would you like?", and after receiving the first order they'll ask the next person "And for yourself?" instead of, e.g., "And for you?").
Scots at its Scotsiest can look like this:
> What ken ye what may cast up the morn? For whatlike is your life? Ye ar but a waff o rouk at kythes a weeock, an syne eelies awa. Ye war better tae say, "Gin it's God's will, we'll be ey tae the fore, an we s' dae this or that." But no ye, na: ye blaw an blowst o what ye'r tae dae.
And speakers will choose a point somewhere between SSE and broad Scots depending on who they're speaking with, the formality, etc. It's quite common to get Scots words like "wee", "dreich", "swither", etc. The next step up is cannae/dinnae/widnae/etc for couldn't/don't/wouldn't/etc. I recently had a Shetlander say I was "glinderin ida sun". And then at some point it switches from "SSE with a Scots influence" to "Scots".
I wonder how the researchers determined that the 's' in "Thanks god" was from the 's' in "gracias" when we already had "Thanks" as a short form of "Thank you" in English. There is also the formula "Thanks be to god" that is common in religious writing.
I don't speak Spanish; but in French, tirer is to pull as well as to shoot, as in pulling the trigger or drawing a bow. So I was surprised that Miamians choose to render it as "throw", the opposite of "pull". So I looked it up; "tirar" is also pull and shoot in Spanish.
I wonder why it didn't turn out as "shoot a photo", which would be consistent with customary english English.
I think the automobile broke English.
In Indian English you can also detrain, which you certainly wouldn’t do in Australian English.
In Australian English, you’d seldom get down from the train any more (unless it’s a piece of playground equipment), because the train floor and the platform are almost always level these days. You would instead get off the train, but you could also exit the train or even disembark (typically used as an intransitive verb). You don’t normally get out of the train, for some reason.
RE: «set off» vs «set down». It is «set down», of course. My brain was passing the gas at the time of typing it up.
Which made me realise how odd it is that English has "ride a motorbike" for even the driver of the motorbike…
-George Carlin
Hinglish, which is a language I've learned (well, I learned Hindi and I grew up speaking English) is a radically different dialect of English. Hindi, like Spanish, is also in a lot of ways very similar to English. But there are enough differences where the logic of the language, when used by Hindi speakers, changes enough that in order to understand the meaning of any given phrase one often needs to know both Hindi and English, even if all the words used are English. What one must understand is, all English words are part of the lexicon of Hindi (as are all Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic words--in fact, alongside the major South Asian literary languages, any language spoken in the region where one is speaking Hindi is a language that loan-words are pulled from. Hindi is more a framework than anything else), such that you can speak Hindi only using English words, and its still basically Hindi. If you don't know Hindi, even if you know every word, you might not understand the meaning of the sentence.
I understand the impetus but linguists for whatever reason are oftentimes politically motivated in this sort of social-justic-y, milquetoast liberal progressive way that stretches the limits of what can and should be rigorously defined as a dialect. AAVE is a real dialect, and there are many different registers of English in the world. I really don't think this rises to that level.
I don't know, maybe you just got dumped by a linguist?
I speak both German and Turkish fluently and for the most cases, I "understand only the train station" ("nur Bahnhof verstehen" means that you understand nothing) when Germans of Turkish origin communicate with each other in German-Turkish, and it's been 14 years since I came here, so I have no hope of ever understanding it.
Those languages tend to evolve apart from both of the origins towards asymmetric intelligibility.
> I understand the impetus but linguists for whatever reason are oftentimes politically motivated in this sort of social-justic-y, milquetoast liberal progressive way that stretches the limits of what can and should be rigorously defined as a dialect.
Well that escalated quickly. People defining dialects because of their political agenda? Anything touches, regardless of positivity, to minorities and people shout SJW!
This has been going on for a while: "I disagree with an recognized expert (linguists) on a fundamental concept (definition of dialect) based on my rather singular experience (or youtube research) so those experts must be 'woke' and I will now become enraged!"
It must be exhausting.
This is worse than Scientism. I'm not going to lay out my credentials for you, I'll just say that most "woke" shit dovetails heavily with far-right ethnonationalism, which I elucidated elsewhere (since you might not know that most cuban-americans are politically aligned with the far-right), and I have no patience for white-liberals, or liberals in general, who go around whining about identity politics without any real social critique.
That is absolutely the case with mainland China where the CCP has weaponised the dialects rhetoric and declared all other Chinese languages that are not Mandarin as mere, lowly dialects despite then being closely related, yet different languages and comprising a larger Chinese language continuum. They have their own respective grammatical and, naturally, lexicon differences.
Such an attitude is also partially rooted in the history of the development of linguistics in ancient China where it was not recognised as such until the encounter with the linguistic studies in neighbouring ancient India as part of the inevitable cultural exchange, but the western style development of linguistics was always stifled in ancient China due to the «celestial kingdom» concept (i.e. no need to learn barbarian tongues).
Predominantly Mandarin speaking young generation (mostly from the north) get a surprise or a few when they 1) come across another Chinese language in writing (officially, it is not meant to exist), 2) realise that the grammar of another Chinese language is incomprehensible to them. It becomes an eye opener to them.
The reality is a bit different, as almost everything in the mainland, and most children are bi- or trilingual if they happen to have been born into a family where parents speak at least one other Chinese language. In between peers, they speak their own language reverting to Mandarin when speaking to a person not native to their region.
The Taiwanese have eventually got it right, and officially recognise Hokkien as a distinct language and now teach it in school as well as fund the Hokkien studies. Hong Kong and Cantonese are somewhat a grey area at the moment, although Cantonese itself is thriving nevertheless.
Well, Cuban-Americans are mostly white and they tend to be members of the far-right, so, it makes sense that a bunch of white liberal social-justice types would support them since the only metric they care about is "diversity." Not to mention, of course, that there is no such thing as a "cuban" ethnicity, Cuba is as ethnically diverse as the United States, probably moreso, its just that the majority of those who fled were the rich white population, which naturally supported anti-communist policies when they came to the US.
Here in Norway, we just call any regional language difference dialectal (unless of course you get to call it a different language, cf. above link). That takes away the need to argue about how much linguistic difference is needed for two dialects to be considered separate or why the difference occurred or whether it's "correct grammar" – if people speak their language differently because they're from different places, that's a dialectal difference. (Anyone who speaks a language thus speaks a dialect of that language.) Simple, but rigorous. There's no value judgement, it's just a factual description.
We would also learn about how language and dialects evolve over time and compare how old people in our local area talk with how young people talk.
What's "emerging" here is that anyone in the media now wants to mention this particular dialect for political reasons. The title of the author is: "Race + Equity Editor". Why divide people over something so subtle? It's not that unusual. There is no such thing as a common American English for this to be distinct from.
This is mentioned on the article linked
All of this is fascinating and it’s intertwined with race. I don’t understand why we should be prohibited fromfrom talking about it.
Why the scare quotes?
That and the fact that it seems to mostly be a few set phrases make me suspicious.
Duck or grouse.
"I made the line to pay for groceries." sounds like a transliteration of "Hice la fila para pagar los abarrotes".
"Carne" means meat but it often means beef specifically.
In Spanish, "bajar de la carreta" (step down from the wagon) was the pre-automobile version.
Aceituna->Oliva.
Alcoba->Habitación
Alcancía->Hucha
Except, of course, for universal stuff like alcohol, álgebra, azúcar, azafrán...
That said, I'm not terribly impressed that there seem to be some Spanish calques in certain Englishes. That seems rather expected and similar things happen all over the world (with different language pairs). I mean, this can still be fun to investigate, but the article makes it sound as if it's something totally out of the ordinary happening.
If we had evidence of actual grammatical shifts, that would be more interesting, but that doesn't appear to be the case here.
They’re maybe some specifics to Miami that are unique but the examples given in the article are not.
One interesting aspect where this is very visible in the english language is meat-related language.
Raw food and animals words, butchered by the common people have mostly germanic/saxon roots that have nothing in common with french words, e.g. lamb, chicken, pork, beef, etc.
But cooked/processed meat has mostly french-derived words: sausage, charcuterie, cutlet, fillet, grill, sirloin, roast, stew..
- Napkin / serviette
- Lavatory or loo / toilet
- Graveyard / cemetery
I disagree that pronouncing it "VALLay" is hypercorrection. Proper French pronunciation would be "vallAY" (with the emphasis on the second syllable).
At any rate, my language background is upper-middle-class English English, and nobody pronounced the word "valitt". That's an americanism, as far as I'm concerned. As a consequence, I've always struggled with the word when used to mean cleaning e.g. a car interior.
FWIW, I understand that the "U and non-U" thing was meant as a joke, was horribly snobbish, and was anchored in a particular stratum of early 20th-C English society.
Fascinating phonetic rotation occuring in the north of the US.
Also, regarding the Miami dialect: obviously fake. I don't see a single "coin" or "crypt" phoneme in the whole article. ;-)
> “We got down from the car and went inside.” (I know Spanish, so this must be "Bajámos del coche y fuimos por dentro")
"We got out of the car and came inside"?
> “I made the line to pay for groceries.” (Hice fila para pagar...)
"He took the line.."?
> “He made a party to celebrate his son’s birthday.”
This look like perfect English to me. o_0
2. "I joined the line ...", although being British I'd be more likely to say "I joined the queue to pay for the shopping", so maybe get an American to double-check this one!
3. "He had a party ..." - I think "make" is used more rarely in English as an auxiliary verb than other languages, typically we "have" or "do" things.
"We got out of the car and went inside" and "I got in line to pay for groceries" and "He hosted/held a party to celebrate his son's birthday."
“I stood in line to pay for groceries”
“He hosted a party to celebrate his son’s birthday”
"We got out of the car and went inside", "I joined the queue to pay for groceries", "He had/held/put-on a party to celebrate [...]".
I wouldn't describe my versions as "correct", but all of the renditions you've offered look to me as if they should be spoken with an accent not from England.