Workforce Language Services

After having learned to speak Spanish in Mexico and then returning to the U.S. to work with people from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, I was surprised and delighted to find how varied the accents, vocabulary, and dialects within this common language are.  Even within my small classroom of native Spanish speakers, there was always room for misunderstanding and subsequent discovery of new forms of expression.  I’ll never forget the day that a Mexican woman asked a Puerto Rican woman “Vas a coger la hua-hua?” and then looked at me and giggled.   The use of the verb coger and the noun hua-hua, instead of camion to refer to a bus was foreign to both of us, yet necessary to be able to communicate with her Puerto Rican classmates.

A CUNY linguist’s study on language and assimilation in New York makes concrete what Spanish-speakers in the U.S. experience every day:

“The longer they’re here, the more they become involved with life in America,” she said. “To say that immigrants become American is pushing it, they don’t all speak English — but their language is more and more influenced by English, and that fits into what we know about immigration.”

The different groups often adopt new vocabulary words from their new neighbors, Mr. Otheguy noted, giving the example of Mexicans living among Dominicans in Washington Heights who pick up the word hua-hua to refer to a city bus. The Mexican term is camion.

The different groups also tend to drop different pronouns, with Mexicans and others from mainland Central and South America eliminating the singular pronoun for you, tu, while Puerto Ricans leave out the third-person pronoun for he, she, or it.

Those who commented on this New York Sun article pointed out that this phenomenon is not unique to New York, but the effects can be seen wherever Spanish-speakers of different national origins intermingle.   I tend to agree, and have found that the Spanish of any urban-dweller changes when they come into contact with English and Spanish from other countries.