Cuban Spanish Research Articles

Vowel nasalization in Cuban Spanish. Formalization and instrumental analysis of speech samples from Havana

Vowel nasalization in Cuban Spanish. Formalization and instrumental analysis of speech samples from Havana

Vowels in Cuban Spanish. An acoustic phonetic study of Havana speech samples

Vowels in Cuban Spanish. An acoustic phonetic study of Havana speech samples

Different Culture, Same Situation? Translating and Applying a Situational Judgment Test From Germany in Cuba

Abstract: Situational judgment tests (SJTs) are popular instruments in selection and assessment. However, the application of SJTs to non-Western cultural contexts remains scarce. In this study, we investigated whether an SJT on personal initiative, developed in Germany and translated into Cuban Spanish, had similar psychometric properties in Cuba. Second, there is an ongoing debate about the extent to which the situation description plays an important role for SJTs. We supposed that the impact of situation descriptions might depend on test takers’ familiarity with the culture in which the SJT was developed. Hence, we tested whether the omission of situation descriptions had larger effects in a Cuban than in a German sample. We applied a 2 (with vs. without situation description in the item stem) × 2 (cultural background: Cuba vs. Germany) between-subjects design ( NCuba = 192, NGermany = 213). The results revealed similar psychometric properties between Cuban and German test takers concerning measurement invariance, construct-related validity, and reliability. In addition, we examined whether samples differ regarding applicant perceptions: Notably, for four of six applicant perception scales, the Cuban sample reported a more positive view of the SJT. Furthermore, we found that the effect of situation availability on SJT performance did not substantially depend on the test takers’ cultural background. Implications for cross-cultural generalizability are discussed.

Variaciones ortográficas en el español de Cuba

Part of the lexical stock of the Cuban macrosystem of speech is still subject to spelling variation. This is because of various historical, etymological, morphological, phonological, or even connotative-affective reasons, which may condition the choice of the graphical output. A map of the current situation of orthographic variation in Cuban Spanish will be presented, taking into consideration the above-mentioned reasons. This work is part of a variational lexicography project of personal authorship that attempts to gather different elements that make up the Cuban diasystem.

Like in a Drop of Water: colloquial Cuban Spanish in just one Joke

Cuban Spanish, its colloquial variety included, is quite a peculiar, perhaps a unique phenomenon. Fruit of the unique history of the Cuban ethnic community, the Cuban colloquial speech has become an amalgam of imprints of many languages, as well as of a host of ethnic and religious traditions. Here, as nowhere else in the Western Hemisphere, with the exception, perhaps, of Brazil, the African heritage stayed very much alive and came afloat first in the language of the Afro-Cuban community as a whole, and then in Cuban Spanish as such. And yet other sources of colloquial Cuban should also be mentioned: first, the colloquial speech of native Spaniards, which were plenty on the Island before the Revolution of 1959 and contributed a lot to the patterns of word-formation in Cuban; and, finally, two more elements: the Portuguese one and the Gipsy one, as units thereof have found a prominent place among the most commonly used Cuban colloquialisms.

The genesis of Cuban Spanish language through nineteenth century egodocuments

The genesis of Cuban Spanish language through nineteenth century egodocuments

The Bluest Sky by Christina Diaz Gonzalez

Reviewed by: The Bluest Sky by Christina Diaz Gonzalez Wesley Jacques Gonzalez, Christina Diaz The Bluest Sky. Knopf, 2022 [320p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780593372791 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780593372814 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 5-8 Bookish, baseball-loving sixth grader Héctor has no interest in giving up his beloved Cuba, his twin best friends and neighbors Teo and Isabel, or his dreams of proudly representing his country in the upcoming International Math Olympiad. Circumstances in the Caribbean nation, however, are changing rapidly in 1980 and his mother is determined to reunite with Héctor and his older brother's dissident gusano father in the United States. While he may not fully grasp the dangers and anxieties of the political climate, Héctor thoughtfully narrates a seemingly sudden shift from being a proud child of the revolution as his family becomes targets of actos de repudio, peppering Cuban Spanish idioms and phrases throughout. It is an acto de repudio that leads to Teo's untimely death as a violent mob falls upon Héctor's home when rumors of his mother's plan to expatriate spread. As Héctor, his mother, and brother abandon all they know for the precarious journey to the U.S., they face violent retaliation and bureaucratic challenges, including a Sophie's Choice of a decision at the port that may split the family apart indefinitely. A bittersweet ending poignantly recontextualizes the importance of family in the face of political divisions. [End Page 49] Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Interrogative Constructions in Cuban Spanish as a Second Language

This work investigates the structure and meaning of main clause wh-questions in Cuban Spanish and argues that individuals learning Cuban Spanish as a Second Language will benefit from practice with grammatical structures that illustrate this behavior. We show that grammaticality judgment data that we obtained from monolingual Cuban Spanish speakers indicate that inverted word order is more likely with non-D-linked and non-Complex wh-expressions, and least likely with D-linked and Complex wh-expressions. More broadly, we argue that this data indicates that Interrogative Inversion in Cuban Spanish is syntactically distinct from Inversion in English wh-questions, and that learners of Spanish as a Second Language thus benefit from exposure to these specific constructions.

Alejandro Cuza (ed.). Cuban Spanish Dialectology: Variation, Contact, and Change

Alejandro Cuza (ed.). Cuban Spanish Dialectology: Variation, Contact, and Change

Hemingway, ese desconocido by Enrique Cirules, and: El vino mejor, Ensayos sobre Ernest Hemingway by Carlos Peón Casas

Reviewed by: Hemingway, ese desconocido by Enrique Cirules, and: El vino mejor, Ensayos sobre Ernest Hemingway by Carlos Peón Casas Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera Cirules, Enrique. Hemingway, ese desconocido. Editorial Arte y Literatura: Havana, 2015. Peón Casas, Carlos. El vino mejor, Ensayos sobre Ernest Hemingway. North Charleston, SC: Create Space, 2017. Using Spanish to analyze Ernest Hemingway’s texts—especially those set in the Cuba or Spain—is a pursuit that produces many layers of nuance external to (or perhaps deep within) monolingual readings in English. Discussing The Old Man and the Sea or “Clean, Well-Lighted Place” in original version—i.e. mostly in English—while communicating in Spanish is an exercise in re-mate: es una actividad que nutre preguntas que no son accesibles en un inglés monolingüe (it is an activity that nurtures questions that are not accessible in a monolingual English). Since Hemingway’s texts first appeared, Cuban intellectuals have provided a rich set of critical views, and in that tradition, two recent studies in this category include Enrique Cirules’s Hemingway, ese desconocido and Carlos Peón Casas’s El vino mejor, Ensayos sobre Ernest Hemingway.1 Cirules and Peón Casas read Hemingway in English as well as in translation. When I pick up books like these, I find myself wondering: what is it like to read Hemingway in English in Cuba, and then in Spanish, for someone from Camagüey or La Habana? What can cross-lingual sensibilities reveal about what Hemingway’s was doing, what his works do now, and how such depths are lost or gained in translation? How do Hemingway’s texts (mis)fit into (trans)national literary canons—like the Cuban, American, or their hybrid molds? In the hands of Cuban intellectuals, do Hemingway’s Cuban texts [End Page 134] afford nuance and character about the places and people? What can Hemingway reveal to Cuban scholars about Cuban English, Cuban Spanish, and the literatures of the island? Peón Casas’s book, El vino mejor: ensayos sobre Ernest Hemingway, includes a prologue by Lino Luis García Espinosa and eleven chapters: “Translating Hemingway in Cuba;” “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Stories—Several Spanish Yarns and a Single Cuban Tale;” “The Transcendence of the Feminine Sea;” “Was Hemingway a Mute Catholic?;” “Hemingway and the Jesuits – a Fishing Tale from Key West;” “Between Texts and Contexts: Syncronicity in Hemingway’s Poetry and Prose, Reflections on a Translation;” “The Cuban Poems of Ernest Hemingway,” and “Ernest Hemingway: The Poet We Still Do Not Know.” Carlos Peón Casas is a master critic whose inquiries take on questions with critical and contextual relevances that transcend Cuba, English and Spanish. His appreciation and reverence for Hemingway’s language and his Cuban experience are grounded in perspectives attuned to the intricacies of local Cuban life and language, and its literatures. Peón Casas places specific attention on how Hemingway’s writings are often “created and set in Cuba” (21), a circumstance which makes “translating Hemingway In Cuba, here and now, not an easy task” (21). He eloquently describes this process as a “great responsibility” that “goes beyond the words themselves” (21, 22). For Peón Casas, Hemingway’s work transcends time, as well as political and cultural boundaries, and the Cuban texts “recreate … a vitalism that he had found at Finca Vigía” (24). This critic calls that space a “genesis” of his project and describes the act of translating “this unknown Hemingway” as a process that makes the work “more ours” (28). For Peón Casas, Hemingway’s poetry “is a pending task for the Cuban reader” (113), since those texts “restore the ambience and surroundings of the Finca Vigía, and portray his Cuban experience, for more than twenty years” (124). Peón Casas has intriguing perspectives on translating Hemingway’s poetry, and maintains that “making Hemingway legible in our rich language is without question a task that goes beyond words” (22).2 He understands Hemingway’s power derives to a degree from the context of “his Cuban home, this site that was so much his own, but also belongs to everyone who reveres his work” (23). Peón Casas...

Cuban Spanish Dialectology: Variation, Contact, and Change Edited by Alejandro Cuza. Foreword by Robert M. Hammond. Georgetown Studies in Spanish Linguistics series. John M. Lipski, Series Editor. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017. pp. vii + 308 p. ISBN: 9781626165106.

Cuban Spanish Dialectology: Variation, Contact, and Change Edited by Alejandro Cuza. Foreword by Robert M. Hammond. Georgetown Studies in Spanish Linguistics series. John M. Lipski, Series Editor. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017. pp. vii + 308 p. ISBN: 9781626165106.

The impact of English on Cuban Spanish: A glossary-based analysis of morphological adaptations (Part 1)

The impact of English on Cuban Spanish: A glossary-based analysis of morphological adaptations (Part 1)

The impact of English on Cuban Spanish: a glossary-based analysis of morphological adaptations (part 2)

This article is intended to explore the linguistic means of anglicization in Cuban Spanish. Thus, a corpus-driven database or glossary of this variant of Spanish has been elaborated to examine these English-induced units quantitatively and qualitatively, entailing a morpho-syntactic and semantic analysis of the anglicization process. This research study is based on two major stages: data collection and data processing of the lemmas compiled. The resulting glossary of this part of the study is used to unravel the semantic traits of the English-induced units, chiefly related to the processes of polysemy and calquing. A compilation of these Cuban-Spanish anglicisms leads to a better understanding of meaning extension and lexical creativity, in keeping with the historical socioeconomic conditions of the island. The collection of colloquialisms, vulgarisms or obsolete words corroborates the diastratic and diaphasic evolution of lemmas, and unveils some distinctive word-building patterns.

Cuban Spanish Dialectology: Variation, Contact, and Change ed. by Alejandro Cuza

Cuban Spanish Dialectology: Variation, Contact, and Change ed. by Alejandro Cuza

Framing the diaspora and the homeland: language ideologies in the Cuban diaspora

Abstract This article discusses language ideologies in relation to political ideologies in the Cuban diaspora in the United States. The findings of three longitudinal attitude studies, two conducted using the methods of perceptual dialectology, and a third with the matched-guise method, indicated that the diaspora’s political beliefs have a robust effect on its beliefs about Cuban Spanish in the diaspora and in the homeland. The perceptions studies showed that the national variety has a high degree of prestige in the diaspora, and that it has very low prestige in Cuba. The results of the matched-guise test showed that participants were unable to differentiate voices recorded in the 1960s and the 1990s, and that social information about residence in Cuba or the diaspora was more important to judgments of correctness than the presence of nonstandard variants. It is argued that the diaspora’s language ideology is maintained through erasure and essentialization: social and linguistic facts are erased, and the homeland is racially essentialized. It is suggested that through its language ideology, the Cuban diaspora claims authenticity and legitimacy vis-à-vis the homeland.

Translation and cultural adaptation of data collection instruments on gender construction in childhood

Abstract Gender studies on childhood imply the use of tools that, if elaborated in another country, they need to be translated and culturally adapted to Brazilian Portuguese. Objectives: To translate and adapt Cuban Spanish versions of the Encuesta de constatación y reflexión del sexismo en el ámbito escolar, and the Cuestionário auto-administrado de constatación y reflexión del sexismo en el ámbito escolar. Method: A qualitative and methodological study was developed with 37 experts (15 teachers of elementary school and 22 healthcare professionals on child health) from the Brazilian cities (Rio de Janeiro, Macaé, Itajaí, Porto Alegre) and Cuban (Habana). Results: Nine original questions of original tools were modified and adapted to the language, culture and elementary Brazilian education system. It was necessary to split the first tool into two separate parts (classroom and break) for facilitating its application by observers. Conclusion: Changes improved the deepness, consistency of observations among observers and introduced more specificity to final versions of tools for further applications on nursing and education studies.

Towards a Typological Account of Pseudo Anglicisms (Illustrated with Loanwords in Cuban Spanish)

La amplia gama de pseudo anglicismos nos demuestra que se pueden encontrar una gran cantidad de categorias. Este articulo tiene como objetivo agrupar dichas clasificaciones de una manera mas global, y compilar los pseudo prestamos de acuerdo a estudios y revisiones anteriores. Las tipologias vienen acompanadas de ejemplos diferenciales, extraidos en su mayoria de diccionarios y glosarios del espanol cubano. Asimismo, esta investigacion se propone describir las causas sociolinguisticas y la evolucion semantica de los pseudo anglicismos, partiendo de la compilacion de estas unidades lexicas, y de una breve referencia a los distintos escenarios socioeconomicos y politicos en la isla. Se han podido verificar y describir algunos procesos de importancia: las evoluciones semanticas en forma de ‘reloj de arena’ y de ‘piramide’, asi como los calcos metaforicos, que permiten verificar como los procesos de polisemia y extension semantica se relacionan directamente con la creacion de pseudo prestamos.

The Anglicization of Cuban Spanish: Lexico-Semantic Variations and Patterns

The impact of English on Cuban Spanish has represented the embodiment of a profound process of acculturation on the island. This empirical study is intended to examine the anglicization of Cuban Spanish by determining anglicizing patterns or strategies in the phonological, morphological, lexical and semantic levels. Thus, the article demonstrates the variability of word-building mechanisms and semantic transparency dia-synchronically. The normative and descriptive analysis is also accompanied by brief contrastive commentaries on divergent and common aspects between Cuban Spanish and European Spanish, illustrated with examples extracted from prior corpora and dictionary revision. The research has shed more light on the universality of certain morpho-phonological patterns in Spanish, as well as the correlation between pragmatic or extralinguistic aspects with lexico-semantic variation, revealing significant changes in sociolects and attitudes.

Anglicisms and calques in upper social class in pre-revolutionary Cuba (1930–1959): A sociolinguistic analysis

<p>The geographical proximity and socioeconomic dependence on the United States brought about a deep rooted anglicization of the Cuban Spanish lexis and social strata, especially throughout the Neocolonial period (1902–1959). This study is based on the revision of a renowned newspaper of that time, Diario de la Marina, and the corresponding elaboration of a corpus of English-induced loanwords. Diario de la Marina particularly targeted upper social class, and only crónicas sociales (society pages’ columns) and print advertising were revised because of their fully descriptive texts, which encoded the ruling class ideology and consumerism. The findings show that there existed a high number of lexical and cultural anglicisms in the sociolect in question, and that the sociolinguistic anglicization was openly embraced by the upper socioeconomic stratum, entailing a differentiating sign of sophistication and social stratification. Likewise, a number of the anglicisms collected, particularly those related with social events, are unused in contemporary Cuban Spanish, which suggests a major semantic shifting in this sociolect after 1959.</p>

Dialect perceptions in real time: A restudy of Miami-Cuban perceptions

Perceptual dialectology investigates nonlinguists’ beliefs about their own and other varieties. This paper fills a gap in longitudinal research in this area with a restudy of the perceptions of Miami Cubans carried out twelve years after the first study. Perceptions are examined in relation to social and demographic changes with a sample of 84 participants of Cuban origin who responded to a questionnaire about the correctness of regional varieties of Spanish. The results showed that perceptions of non-Cuban varieties remained relatively stable over time, continuing to correlate with race and poverty. Perceptions toward the Cuban Spanish of the Miami community were also stable and, as in the earlier study, were highly positive, reflecting strong beliefs in its correctness-status. In contrast, perceptions of Cuban Spanish on the island were significantly more negative; it was ranked the least correct of the regional varieties evaluated. Factors underlying perceptions are examined in relation to demographic changes, political ideology, and beliefs about race and poverty. This paper highlights the contribution of the longitudinal study of dialect perceptions to the understanding of language attitudes, intergroup relations, and language change.