Hablando Dominicano

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!

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"¿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!