Dominican Spanish (español dominicano) is Spanish as spoken in the Dominican Republic; and also among the Dominican diaspora, most of whom live in the United States, chiefly in New York City, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Dominican Spanish, a Caribbean variety of Spanish, is based on the Andalusian and Canarian Spanish dialects of southern Spain, and has influences from Native Taíno and other Arawakan languages. Speakers of Dominican Spanish may also use conservative words that are similar to older variants of Spanish. The variety spoken in the Cibao region is influenced by the 16th and 17th-century Spanish and Portuguese colonists in the Cibao valley, and shows a greater than average influence by the 18th-century Canarian settlers. Despite the large share of African ancestry among Dominicans (see Afro-Dominicans), the African element in the local Spanish is not as important as one might expect. There is also a significant influence from African languages in the Spanish spoken by Haitian and Afro-Caribbean migrant descendants in the Dominican Republic, particularly in grammar and phonetics. However, second generation immigrants from Haiti use to speak very close to the Dominican standard speech, if not actually speaking it, assimilating into the mainstream speech.

History

Most of the Spanish-speaking settlers came from Andalusia (southern Spain) and the Canary Islands. When they first arrived in what is now the Dominican Republic, the first native people they had contact with were the Arawak-speaking Taino people. Spanish, just as in other Latin American countries, completely replaced the indigenous languages (Taíno, Macorix and Ciguayo) of the Dominican Republic to the point where they became entirely extinct, mainly due to the fact that the majority of the indigenous population quickly died out only a few years after European contact. However, when the Spanish arrived, they found the flora and fauna of the island, as well as various cultural artifacts, very different from those of Spain, so many of the words used by the natives to name these things were conserved and assimilated, thereby enriching Spanish lexicon. Some of these words include: ají, anón, batata, barbacoa, bejuco, bija, caiman, canoa, caoba, conuco, guanábana, guayaba, hamaca, hobo (jobo), hutía, iguana, jagua, maní, papaya (lechosa), sabana, yuca. Dominican Spanish also includes words indirectly borrowed from African languages via Portuguese, such as cachimbo, which was borrowed from the Portuguese word "cacimba", having the latter being borrowed from the Bantu "cazimba". Many of these African influences are quite distant and left a minor impact on modern day Dominican Spanish, and usually these words are also used in other Spanish-speaking countries as far-away as Argentina, therefore it is not just a phenomenon restricted to the Dominican Republic but common in the Latin American Spanish (compared to European Spanish). Dominican Spanish has also received some limited influence from Haitian Creole, due to the Haitian occupation of Santo Domingo and continuing cross-border contacts. Haitian influence is stronger in border regions. Haitian Creole and Samaná English have also influenced the speech of Samaná Province further adding to the African influence found in the dialect.

Phonology

Other differences with Standard Spanish include adding the s erroneously, thus overcompensating the habit of omitting it. Example 1: Example 2: The hypercorrected form is often part of a blatantly sarcastic mode of speech, commonly used for joking rather than everyday speech. It's often called hablar fisno 'speaking finely', with an extra 's' in fino. Among rural children in El Cibao, s-insertion is still common, which calls into question its status as a hypercorrection since these children have little exposure to standard forms of speech. Word-internally, s-insertion is most common before voiceless stop consonants, especially, and almost never occurs before nasals. Rural residents of El Cibao frequently insert an s after function words, as in des todo 'of everything'. This is typically before stop consonants but can occasionally be before vowels, as in des animales 'of animals'. Some speakers also use final s-insertion as a prosodic boundary marker. There are also hypercorrections of the merger of and into. For example, Haití 'Haiti' may be pronounced Artís.

Grammar

Voseo is unknown in Dominican Spanish. Some well-known grammatical features of Dominican Spanish include the use of overt dummy pronouns, as in hay arroz 'there is rice', especially prominent in El Cibao, instead of hay arroz, and double negation, as in yo no voy no 'I am not going'. Both of those are associated with more marginalized sociolects. Pedro Henríquez Ureña claims that, at least until 1940, the educated population of the Dominican Republic continued to use the future subjunctive verb forms (hablare, hubiere). Educated Dominicans never used the conditional in place of the imperfect subjunctive, as in Si yo habría visto 'If I had seen', nor did they ever use the imperfect subjunctive instead of the conditional, as in entonces yo hubiese dicho 'then I would have said'. Clitic object pronouns could often be placed after a finite verb, especially in narration, as in llega y vístese de prisa instead of the typical llega y se viste de prisa 'arrives and gets dressed quickly'. Like in other Caribbean varieties of Spanish, explicit, redundant subject pronouns are frequent in Dominican Spanish. Pronominal uno 'one' may be frequently used, in cases where speakers of other varieties would use impersonal or reflexive se constructions. Personal subject pronouns can be used to refer to inanimate objects: Ella (la comunidad) es grande 'She (the community) is big'. Dominican Spanish allows for "preverbal placement of subjects with interrogatives and with non-finite clauses". In more normative speech, the subject would typically go after the verb instead. Some examples are: ¿Qué ustedes quieren comer? 'What do you guys want to eat?' and Eso es para Odalis llevárselo a Lari 'That's for Odalis to take it to Lari'. Other prominent aspects of Dominican Spanish include focalizing ser constructions, and clause-final negation and affirmation:

Rural El Cibao

In addition to these traits, the following has been found in rural speech in El Cibao, among people who are functionally illiterate, by : Likely related to the frequent use of subject pronouns, in the Cibao region ello 'it/there' may be used as a dummy pronoun with "impersonal and meteorological verbs, unaccusative predicates, impersonal passives, and other constructions in which transitives are used intransitively": It's been suggested that ello functions as a discourse marker. Also, among rural Cibaeño speakers at least, experiencers tend to become the subject rather than the object of certain verbs such as gustar, hacer falta, and parecer: Cibaeños often drop the a should occur before a definite animate direct object: They also use a unique pattern of cliticization:

Vocabulary

Dominican vocabulary

As in every dialect, Dominican Spanish has numerous vocabulary differences from other forms of the language. The Dominican Academy of Letters (Academia Dominicana de la Lengua) published in November 2013 a dictionary of Dominican terms (Diccionario del español dominicano) containing close to 11,000 words and phrases peculiar to the Dominican dialect. Here are some examples: A slightly pejorative slang expression also common around most of the Caribbean basin is vaina. The Castilian meanings are "sheath", "pod", "shell", "shell casing", and "hull" (of a plant). It is descended from the Latin word "vāgīna", which meant "sheath". In the Dominican Republic "vaina" is mainly a thing, a matter, or simply "stuff". For example, ¿Qué vaina es esa? means ¿Qué cosa es esa?, "What is that thing/stuff?". Anglicisms—due to cultural and commercial influence from the United States and the American occupations of the Dominican Republic during 1916–1924 and 1965–1966—are extremely common in Dominican Spanish, more so than in any other Spanish variant except for Puerto Rican and perhaps Northern Mexican Spanish. A prime example of this is "vaguada", which is a corruption of the English "bad weather", though in Dominican Spanish the term has come to mean storm or torrential downpour, rather than a spot of unpleasant climate. Hence, a common Dominican expression: "Viene una vaguada", "here comes a vaguada", or "here comes a storm". Another excellent example of this is "boche", a corruption of the English "bull shit", though in Dominican Spanish the term has come to mean a reprimanding, fulmination, or harangue in general terms. Hence, a common Dominican expression: "Me echaron un boche", "they threw me a boche", or "they reprimanded me". Furthermore, is the Dominican Spanish word for SUV, "yipeta", "jeepeta", or rarely "gipeta". This term is a corruption of the American "Jeep", which was the primary mode of transport for the GIs throughout the country during the occupation in the 1960s. Dominican license plates for SUVs are marked with a "G" for "gipeta", a variant of, and pronounced like, "yipeta", before their serial number. The word "tichel", from "T-shirt", also refers to a rugby shirt, association football jersey, or undershirt, and similarly, "corn flakes" and its variant "con fléi" can refer to any breakfast cereal, in Dominican Spanish, be it puffed corn, bran flakes, or puffed wheat. The borrowing "polo shirt" is frequently pronounced polo ché. Another phenomenon related to Anglicisms is the usage of brand names as common names for certain objects. For example, "Gillette" and its derivative yilé refer to any razor, and while the machete is known as machete, this being originally a Spanish word, it is sometimes referred to as a "colín", derived from "Collins & Co.", name of a former Connecticut toolmaker.

Similarities in Spanish dialects

Below are different vocabulary words to demonstrate the similarities between the dialects of the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean countries, including Puerto Rico, Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama. The dialects of Andalusia and the Canary Islands, two regions of Spain that have been highly influential on the dialects of these countries, are also included.

Some words and names borrowed from Arawakan