November 30th, 2023 (4:30pm – 6:00pm Boston | 22:30pm Madrid) | In Person & Via Zoom
RSVP: https://bit.ly/RSVPObservatorio or info-observatory@fas.harvard.edu
On the eve of Castro's 1959 takeover of Cuba, few imagined what the linguistic consequences of the Revolution might be, much less what they would be for how people speak English 90 miles away in Miami. In the wake of the Revolution and its political reverberations, the first condition for a new dialect emerged: the movement of people and the dialects of Spanish they took with them. Fiirst, the Cuban aristocracy, then the middle class; later, political exiles from Nicaragua, Colombia, Venezuela, etc. What in the early 20th Century was a typical Southern U.S. town comprised of English monolinguals turned, by the end of the century, into a Latinx-majority metropolis with varying degrees of Spanish/English bilingualism. With these demographic transformations—termed the 'Cubanization', later 'Hispanicization', of Miami by Boswell (1994)—the influence of Spanish on English extended beyond the speech of immigrants. Select features in grammar, phonology, and lexicon were passed down and incorporated into the speech of their children, including those born in Miami. In this talk, Carter will describe the social, historical, and political conditions giving rise to the formation of a new English dialect in Miami, offering an overview of some of its features attributable to the contact situation with Spanish.
Phillip M. Carter is a Professor of Linguistics and English at Florida International University, where he is also the Director of the Center for Humanities in an Urban Environment. Carter is the author of dozens of articles and chapters in books addressing issues of language and politics, language variation and change, language contact and bilingualism, and issues of identity. Alongside Julie Tetel Andresen, he co-authored Languages in the World: How History, Culture, and Politics Shape Language.
Language: English