Карибские диалекты испанского языка

Spanish dialects of the Caribbean region

Caribbean Spanish (lang es, espaˈɲol kaɾiˈβeɲo) is the general name of the Spanish dialects spoken in the Caribbean region. The Spanish language was introduced to the Caribbean in 1492 with the voyages of Christopher Columbus. It resembles the Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands, and, more distantly, the Spanish of western Andalusia. With more than 25 million speakers, Spanish is the most widely spoken language in the Caribbean Islands. More precisely, the term in its strictest sense however refers to the Spanish language as it is spoken on the Caribbean island nations of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. In a much looser sense, it can also include the Caribbean coasts of Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela; and on the widest application of the phrase, it includes the Caribbean coastal regions of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica.

As in all American variants of Spanish the third person plural pronoun ustedes has supplanted the pronoun [[vosotros. Voseo is now completely absent from insular Caribbean Spanish. Contemporary commentators such as the Cuban Esteban Pichardo speak of its survival as late as the 1830s (see López Morales 1970:136‑142) but by the 1870s it appears to have become confined to a small number of speakers from the lowest social strata. In addition to most of Central America, voseo is used in the northwest of Venezuela (states of Falcón and Zulia), in the north of the Colombian department of Cesar, in the south of La Guajira department on Colombia's Atlantic coast, and in the Azuero Peninsula in Panama. The diminutive (ito, ita) takes the form (ico, ica) after : pato→patico, pregunta→preguntica. BUT perro→perrito. Possibly as a result of the routine elision of word final , some speakers may use as a plural marker, but generally this tendency is limited to words with singular forms that end in a stressed vowel: café 'coffee' → 'coffees', sofá 'sofa' → 'sofas'.

The second person subject pronouns, tú (or vos in Central America) and usted, are used more frequently than in other varieties of Spanish, contrary to the general Spanish tendency to omit them when meaning is clear from the context (see pro drop language). Thus, tú estás hablando instead of estás hablando. The tendency is strongest in the island countries and, on the mainland, in Nicaragua, where voseo (rather than the use of tú for the second person singular familiar) is predominant. So called "wh questions", which in standard Spanish are marked by subject/verb inversion, often appear without the inversion in Caribbean Spanish: "¿Qué tú quieres?" for standard "¿Qué quieres (tú)?" ("What do you want? ").