This post is dedicated to my lovely
cousin Caroline, a Spanish student after my own heart. Spanish was
one of my favorite subjects in middle school and high school, and
I've had the chance to put it to very good use. In a few years, maybe
she'll get to use Spanish as much as I do, although I hope her
experience involves few mosquitoes!
"¿Aonde tú 'taba?"
"Mete lo guineo en la funda."
"Paco 'ta 'cotao."
"Dame un chin desa lechosa."
"¡Mi mai 'ta guapa!"
For those of you who thought you spoke Spanish, don't worry if you can't decode the lines above; they're written in Dominican, which sometimes seems like it should be classified as another language.
Living here in the DR, I've enjoyed not
just learning more about how the Spanish language works, but also
learning about what makes the Dominican dialect different from other
varieties of Spanish. In this post I'll be explaining some of the
features of Dominican Spanish which makes it different than the
Spanish I learned in school.
Phonetics
Phonetics is a linguistic term used to
talk about the sounds used in language, and it's probably this that
sets Dominican Spanish apart more than anything else.
1.) The most famous
example is the letter S: Dominicans almost never pronounce the S a
the end of a syllable.
| English | Standard Spanish | Dominican Spanish |
|---|---|---|
| I'm looking for the matches | Busco los fósforos. | Buco lo fóforo. |
Not all the S's disappear, but only the
ones at the end of a syllable. Also, it's the S sound, and
not the letter, so Z and C can also be affected.
| English | Standard Spanish | Dominican Spanish |
|---|---|---|
| tailor | sastre | satre |
| system | sistema | sitema |
| rice | arroz | arró |
| pencil | lápiz | lapi |
Not pronouncing S at the end of words
can cause some confusion. It's not always clear whether a word is
singular or plural, but that usually doesn't impact the meaning
enough to cause trouble. The real problem is with verbs, because an S
is the only difference between 'you talk' (hablas) and 'he/she talks'
(habla) or 'you have' (tienes) and 'he/she has' (tiene). In places
like this where the meaning would be unclear, Dominicans use the
pronoun (tú), even though pronouns usually get left out in Spanish
| English | Standard Spanish | Dominican Spanish |
|---|---|---|
| What do you have? | ¿Qué tienes? | ¿Qué tú tiene? |
| How are you? | ¿Cómo estás? | ¿Cómo tú 'ta? |
2.) Most Dominicans know that more 'formal'
or 'sophisticated' Spanish has more S's, so they'll sometimes add
them back in when they want to sound more educated. The problem is,
they usually don't know where the S's are supposed to be, so they add
them in the wrong places! Linguists call this
'hypercorrection'...they 'correct' things that don't need to be
corrected.
My name is Agustín (ah-goos-teen)
which becomes Agutín (actually, when a word ends in N it usually
becomes NG, so they pronounce my name 'a-goo-teeng'). But my name
can pick up one or two extra S's and turn into Asgusting or even
Asgustins. I've had someone offer me a ride on a 'mosto' (should be
'moto' – motorcycle), and one little girl asked to borrow my
'cásmara' (camera).
3.) Another common phonetic change in
Dominican Spanish is dropping the letter D from between two vowels.
| English | Standard Spanish | Dominican Spanish |
|---|---|---|
| tired | cansado | cansao |
| nothing | nada | ná |
| everything/all | todo | tó |
Lexicon
Lexicon is the linguistic term for
vocabulary. Dominicans use a few words that don't exist in other
dialects of Spanish, although some of them belong to the whole
Caribbean, not just to the Dominican Republic. Here are some of the
common ones:
| English | Standard Spanish | Dominican Spanish |
|---|---|---|
| a little | un poco/poquito | un chin |
| bus | autobús | guagua |
| thing | cosa | vaina (sometimes considered impolite) |
| small | pequeño | chiquito |
| banana | banana | guineo |
| papaya | papaya | lechosa |
| goat | cabra | chivo |
| tree | árbol | mata |
| dad | papá | pai (from 'papi') |
| mom | mamá | mai (from 'mami') |
| where | dónde | aónde (from 'adónde') |
| to where | adónde | pa'onde (from 'para adónde') |
'Para' very often gets shortened to 'pa' or even just 'p'.
There are also some standard Spanish words that have a different meaning here in the DR:
| Word | Standard Meaning | Dominican Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| guapo | pretty/handsome | angry |
| bolsa | bag | scrotum |
| funda | pillowcase | bag |
Examples
Finally, here are the sentences from the start of this post, translated twice: first from Dominican into Spanish, and then into English!| Dominican | Standard Spanish | English |
|---|---|---|
| ¿Aonde tú 'taba? | ¿Dónde estabas? | Where were you? |
| Mete lo guineo en la funda. | Mete las bananas en la bolsa. | Put the bananas in the bag. |
| Paco 'ta 'cotao. | Paco está acostado. | Paco is lying down. |
| Dame un chin desa lechosa. | Dame un poquito de esa papaya. | Give me a little bit of that papaya. |
| ¡Mi mai 'ta guapa! | ¡Mi madre está enojada! | My mom is angry! |
