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Great Bulk of the Vocabulary of the Caribbean, However, Is Shared with the Entire Spanish-Speaking World

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Great Bulk of the Vocabulary of the Caribbean, However, Is Shared with the Entire Spanish-Speaking World Spanish in the Northeast 193 great bulk of the vocabulary of the Caribbean, however, is shared with the entire Spanish-speaking world. The frequency with which Caribbean vocabulary items are heard throughout the Northeast has led to some lexical leveling. In New York City, for example, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Cubans, and Colombians maintain their regional dialect, especially for in-group conversations, but almost everyone has picked up words from one or more of the other dialects (Zentella 1990a). Those that are not easily forgotten are learned the hard way, as a result of embarrassing moments caused when a common term, like the words for “insect” or “papaya,” turn out to have a taboo meaning in another dialect. Words that are not taboo, but are very common, become popular in almost everyone’s Spanish. If you want to find a local busorgrocery, ask about la guagua and la bodega;ifyou are offered a china, expect an orange – not a Chinese female; and if you hear chevere,´ something is ‘terrific.’ A few Caribbean words become generalized, but Caribbean Spanish speakers often make an effort to avoid or translate regionalisms that Latinos from other regions may not understand, and the same courtesy is extended to them. Ultimately, the Spanish vocabulary that is heard in the Northeast descends from the Ta´ıno–African–Spanish mix that took place five hundred years ago in the Caribbean, which is now mixing with dialects from other parts of the Spanish-speaking world. This inter-dialectal mix is further enriched by words that are borrowed from English, as when the competing ways of saying “kite” in at least four dialects of Spanish are neutralized by the widespread adoption of kite (Zentella 1990). The regional origin of Spanish speakers is given away by intonation patterns and pronunciation, even before they are identified by lexical items. The way each group canta ‘sings’ – referring to the customary rise and fall of voices in declarative sentences, or questions, or exclamations, and so on – is distinctive. Both the specific “songs,” or intonation contours, and the consonants and vowels of the Spanish of an area, are rooted in the indigenous languages of the origi- nal inhabitants, the dialect(s) from Spain spoken by those who settled the area, and the slaves’ African languages. Little is known about Ta´ıno and other Indian languages of the Caribbean because the native peoples of that region were vir- tually exterminated by the middle of the sixteenth century. As a result, scholars believe that the impact of Indian languages on the Spanish of the area was lim- ited. To replace the Indians, Africans were enslaved in large numbers to carry on with the work, especially in the cane fields of lowland areas. Reportedly, the Africans learned Spanish and accommodated quickly to their European mas- ters’ culture (Rosario 1970: 13), but stigmatized pronunciations are often falsely assumed to have originated with them. Lipski (1994: 96) maintains that speakers of west African languages, particularly KiKongo, Kimbundu/Umbundu, Yoruba, Efik, Igbo, Ewe/Fon, and Akan, accelerated or reinforced Spanish pronunciations that corresponded to their own, but they originated very few features, which are now rare. As for the origin of the Spaniards who settled the Caribbean colonies, immigration figures point to southern Spain (Andalusia), as do the characteristics 194 ana celia zentella of present day Andalusian Spanish. The colonists and sailors who came from Andalusia had a greater impact on Spanish in the Caribbean and ports all along the coasts of Central and South America than did speakers of Castilian, the prin- cipal dialect of north central Spain (Canfield 1981, Cotton and Sharp 1988). The Castilian-speaking clerics and administrators sent by the crown to the predom- inantly inland seats of power left their mark on the Spanish of those cities – Mexico, Lima, and Cuzco, for example – as did the principal Indian languages and cultures that were not exterminated. In any case, as is true of the dialects of Latin America and Spain today, Andalusian and Castilian varieties of Spanish were enough alike during colonization that “few Castilians or Andalusians had to significantly modify their speech in order to communicate with one another” (Lipski 1994: 46). The regular and extended contact of Andalusian Spanish with African lan- guages and with the remnants of Indian languages and cultures in Latin Amer- ica’s ports during the colonial era explains why dialects in very distant countries, for example, Guayaquil, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic, resemble each other today. “Coastal/lowland dialects show a homogeneity over vast geographi- cal expanses . ,” and “the phonetic similarities between coastal Latin American Spanish and Andalusian Spanish are striking...”(Lipski 1994: 8). The expanse referred to includes Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Mexico, Central America’s Pacific coast, Venezuela, and the Pacific coast of South America from Colombia to northern Chile. The pho- netic similarities that speakers from this region share in their informal, popular Spanish, and that distinguish them from speakers raised in the interior highlands of Mexico, Central and South America, are few and primarily affect consonants. The principal phonetic markers, which are heard every day in the Northeast, are the following: (1) /s/ (which may be written with an <s> or <z>) may be aspirated (pronounced like the /h/ in her)ordeleted altogether when it is at the end of a syllable or a word: andaluz /andaluh/ or /andalu/ ‘Andalusian’ estos costenos˜ /ehtoh kohte˜noh/ or /eto kote˜no/ ‘these coastal people’ (2) the letters <g> (before <e>, <i>), and <j> are aspirated, not pro- nounced as a fricative, as in the German pronunciation of “Bach”: gente joven /hente hoven/ ‘young people’ (3) /-n/ at the end of words sounds like the final sound in “sing” /siŋ/. It may be deleted and the vowel that remains becomes nasalized: sin ton ni son /siŋ toŋ ni soŋ/or/s˜ıt˜onis˜o/ ‘without rhyme or reason’ (4) syllable-final and word-final /l/ and /r/ are often difficult to distinguish, particularly in the speech of the least educated. (Many Asians who speak English as a second language also neutralize /l/ and /r/, but Spanish in the Northeast 195 in Spanish this occurs in final position only.) Sometimes final /l/ is realized as [r] but, more frequently, syllable final /r/ is realized as [l], for example: delantal /delantar/ ‘apron’; reportar /repoltal/ ‘to report’ (5) /d/ between vowels is deleted: almidonado /almionao/ ‘starched’. Of these variations, the deletion or aspiration of syllable-final or word-final /-s/ (see (1), hereafter referred to as “final /s/”) is most commented on, and the debate reveals contrasting cultural attitudes toward the pronunciation of /s/. Spanish speakers who are not from the coastal areas of Latin America criticize the aspi- ration or loss of /s/ so mercilessly that I refer to the phenomenon as “the tyranny of –s.” Their insistence that “the best Spanish” is one that pronounces every word as it is written is their basis for arguing that Colombia deserves that honor. Ignorant of the Andalusian origin and African strengthening of the aspirated or deleted final /s/ in Caribbean Spanish – or perhaps because of it – and of the Castil- ian and Indian roots of its maintenance in Bogot´a and other highland dialects, they view deletion or aspiration as the sloppy habits of low-status speakers. In fact, the widespread instability of final /s/ throughout the coastal areas and, in particular, the high rates of aspiration among Cubans and Puerto Ricans and of deletion among Dominicans (Terrell 1982a, b) are maintained as a consequence of negative attitudes towards the stressing of final /s/, especially in informal speech. In formal settings, like judicial proceedings or poetry readings, educated speak- ers in the Caribbean tend to pronounce final /s/. But otherwise, rapid fire pronunci- ations of final /s/ communicate vanity, self-importance, or – in males – effeminacy (Rosario 1970: 81, Nu˜nez Cede˜no 1980). Dominicans, in particular, ridicule com- patriots who emphasize final /-s/, accusing them of “hablando fiSno,” (‘talking fine,’ with an intrusive /s/ in fino)orof“comiendo eSpaguettiS” (‘eating spaghetti,’ said stressing each /s/). In the Northeast, then, the Caribbean preference for the aspiration or deletion of final /s/, which has meaningful cultural implications for them, is stigmatized by speakers from Colombia and the interior regions of South America. Since many of the critics enjoy higher academic, racial, and socioe- conomic status than those they criticize, speakers of Caribbean Spanish suffer heightened feelings of linguistic insecurity, which encourage the loss of Spanish and exacerbate their social and educational problems (Zentella 1990a). The irony is that while the aspiration or deletion of final /s/ is discredited, the aspiration of /s/ at the beginning of a syllable or between vowels (hereafter referred to as “initial /s/”), which occurs in the central highlands of Colombia but not in the Caribbean, is ignored. Even highly educated cachacos (Colombians from the cen- tral highlands) say /pahamos/ instead of /pasamos/ for pasamos ‘we pass,’ and aspirate the first /s/ in words with more than one, for example, asesino /ahesino/ ‘assassin.’ In fact, “. central Colombia is unique in the Spanish-speaking world in reducing /s/ more frequently in syllable-initial than in syllable-final position” (Lipski 1994: 209). Nor is Colombia free of final /s/ aspiration or deletion, both 196 ana celia zentella of which are common in the costeno˜ ‘coastal’ Spanish spoken in Cartagena and Barranquilla on the Caribbean coast, and along the Pacific coast. The details about consonants and vowels in Spanish dialects are important because they prove that judgments concerning linguistic correctness are actually social judgments, that is, they are not based on linguistic facts but on group fears, involving class and racial prejudices.
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