A linguistics professor found that even Miamians who aren’t fluent in Spanish use or understand phrases that are direct translations.

By Patricia Mazzei

Patricia Mazzei reported from Miami, where she lives and has become super fluent in Miami English, bro.

The stereotype of how many Miamians speak involves a sing-songy rhythm with a heavy-sounding “L” and a generous sprinkling of Spanglish. But what if the conversational language of South Florida were more than a lively accent? What if it were a distinct regional dialect of American English?

Phillip M. Carter, a linguistics professor at Florida International University, argues that it already is. Miami English, he calls it. And he is on a mission to destigmatize it.

“This is probably the most important bilingual situation in the Americas today,” Dr. Carter said.

More than 60 years of steady immigration from Spanish-speaking countries have heavily influenced the local English’s vowel system (Miami residents often speak English with Spanish vowel sounds), grammatical structure and lexicon, he explained: “English is influencing Spanish, but Spanish is also influencing English.”

The result is a version of English that is just as worthy of recognition as other widely accepted dialects, Dr. Carter said, such as the ones spoken in New York or in the American South.

“People are really tired of being told that they’re wrong, and tired of being corrected,” he said, adding that “those linguistic differences are a really important part of people’s identities.”

In his latest study, Dr. Carter and a co-author, Kristen D’Alessandro Merii, posited that decades of exposure to Spanish, which often feels like Miami’s dominant language, has resulted in phrases spoken and understood even by native English speakers who are not fluent in Spanish. (Some amount of Spanish is spoken in perhaps half of Miami-Dade County households, Dr. Carter estimated, though in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods, that figure can exceed 90 percent.)

Those phrases, translated from Spanish, are known as calques. For example: Get down from the car (bajarse del carro), instead of get out of the car. Make the line (hacer la fila), instead of join the line. She recommended me this (me recomendó esto), instead of she recommended this to me.

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