It is the second-largest Caribbean country, covering approximately 18, square miles. The DR shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. Christopher Columbus and his crew landed on the island on December 5, The present-day Domican Republic was part of the Spanish empire until the late 18th century.
In the 19th century, France, Spain, and Haiti controlled it at different times. The U. The current population is approximately 10 million, with about 3 million people living in the capital, Santo Domingo. A variety of Spanish languages are spoken within the country. Collectively, these are referred to as Dominican Spanish.
Dominican Spanish is not only spoken in the Dominican Republic but also among the Dominican diaspora in the U. The dialect is a subset of Caribbean Spanish, which is based on Canarian and Andalusian dialects of southern Spain. The indigenous people of the island prior to colonization were called Arawak.
Dominican Spanish thus borrows some words from Arawak language, as well as from the African languages spoken by Africans who came to the island. It is the main language for commerce, business, government offices, and schools. In addition, most media publications in the Dominican Republic are printed or recorded in Spanish.
If you listen to any bachata music, a lot of the artists that are well known actually come from that region. Host: And campo is the countryside right?
We would say in English like the country country accent. People that live kind of out of the city, country bumpkins, whatever you want to call it. Because we talked about el Cibao which is more towards the north. Kesia: Yes, so the East is very famous for the tourism. I think everyone knows where Punta Cana is. The beaches are beautiful in this area. So you have the East and then you have the South of the country.
Host: Ah okay. Like you said, people from el Cibao have a very unique sound as well. And we also speak very loud. I grew up black in the U. So can you explain that? Kesia: Yes, it is. Host: But in some cases you also have the feminine form of the word. It could be a little difficult to pick up on that. I think that one of the reasons why people perceive that Dominicans speak faster because, honestly, I think Spainards also speak pretty fast.
I went to Panama and they also speak pretty fast. There's entire letters missing. Host: So once I got the hang of that, it made a lot more sense to me, at least listening to people from the DR. Obviously I'm a gringa. The S's kind of disappear. Host: That does not apply to S's at the beginning of words because that would be really confusing, right?
Host: Yeah, that would be really weird. Host: Something else I noticed about Dominican Spanish in general is some of the informality of it.
Yo estoy bien gracias. It sounds like a robot. Host: And I know one thing. But I hear it in a different order. We will switch the order of the words. The person comes first. Thank you so much Kesia for your time. Hopefully this has been helpful for everyone, and again I want to thank you Kesia for your time. This is patently untrue; each Spanish-speaking country has its particular slang that can be incomprehensible to foreigners—I experienced this in Cuba—and though some words might be unfamiliar, the building blocks of the language are much the same.
Alba muses that it is possible that nowhere else in the Spanish-speaking world are so many dated words still used. However, we also speak a dialect that is constantly changing and making space for new words like parqueo for parking lot and bipear for paging someone on a beeper or leaving a missed call on a cellphone in order to get someone to call you back.
It would be impossible to condense every little nuance of the Dominican dialect into a blogpost, so here are just a few things that might help aid the listening comprehension of our dialect. Listening to and producing this sound repetitively should help you master it. Make sure you listen to the Latin American Spanish examples on the links and not the Spanish dialects! A pronunciation phenomenon known as seseo operates in Dominican Spanish as it does in all the Latin American Spanish varieties.
This means that s and z spellings are both pronounced as [s]. This again can create homophones, e. It may be left out altogether and the previous vowel nasalized if followed by b, d or g. FluentU takes real-world videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.
The birthplace of Merengue! This is definitely somewhere to visit the island. Here, r and l at the ends of syllables can be pronounced as an i , e. Known for its large lake, Enriquillo, the southern region is mostly arid and hot with stunning coastal lagoons.
The l at the end of syllables can be pronounced as r in this region. Santo Domingo is the first settlement of Europeans in the Americas and so has a great deal of history.
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