Cuban-American Spanish revisited: sociolinguistic and pragmatic peculiarities

Abstract

This article describes the sociolinguistic traits of Cuban-American Spanish, especially in south Florida. By revising already-built corpora and dictionaries, the study aims at examining the correlation between linguistic borrowing, and sociocultural and pragmatic elements in an attempt to shed more light on the concepts of Spanglish and code-switching. This revision is complemented by a historical account of Cuban-American migration, a normative study of this dialectal Spanish variant, and the collection of indigenous multiword phrases. Some of the earlier findings indicate that Cuban-American Spanish reflects the variability of this form of Spanglish as its usage and conventions are highly reliant on the pragmatic features of Cuban-American Spanish speakers. Culturally speaking, Miami-based Spanish reveals the existence of a differentiating sentiment, which contrasts with the inevitably assimilated American codes, i.e. a strong sense of bicultural identity.