Abstract
This study found that monolingual English speakers from Miami speak an English variety influenced by Spanish. In this study, speech from Miami English monolinguals, English monolinguals not from Miami, and early and late Spanish-English bilinguals were collected, and rhythm metrics (Ramus et al., 1999) were compared between groups. Surprisingly, results also suggest that Miami English monolinguals with English-speaking parents and from neighborhoods with a lower Hispanic population may be leading this change. These results support Labov’s (2014) claim that children may reject features of their parent language (in this case, English) when the speech community is highly stratified.
Highlights
In 2013, various news organizations—including the Miami Herald, Sun Sentinel, and Business Insider—published articles on the emergence of an English dialect unique to Miami
The results suggest that MEM rhythm is influenced by Spanish
MEMLs have a significantly lower ∆C than IEMs. These results suggest that MEMs and EBs with less access to the dominant speech community, in regards to proximity and familial connections, are leading this dialectal change
Summary
In 2013, various news organizations—including the Miami Herald, Sun Sentinel, and Business Insider—published articles on the emergence of an English dialect unique to Miami. Nava (2011) defines rhythm as “the regular occurrence of a beat event, such that there is a perceived patterning of ‘heavy’ (or strong) and ‘light’ (or weak) elements, and this perception results from the acoustic correlates, such as duration, pitch, intensity, and spectral quality, associated with stressed versus unstressed syllables” (84). Based on these acoustic correlates, languages have been characterized in the past as having one of two rhythms: a syllable-timed or stress-timed rhythm—and more recently, a third: a mora-timed rhythm (Pike 1945, Abercrombie 1967, Ramus et al 1999). Like Spanish or Italian, were labeled as syllabletimed because of their ‘machine-gun rhythm.’ Germanic languages, like English or Dutch, were considered stress-timed because of their ‘Morse code rhythm.’ Languages like Japanese and Tamil were labeled as mora-timed
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