From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.
I'm John McWhorter,
and I want to take something from what we could call the headlines at this point,
which is something that many people are writing me about and even in conversation talking to me about,
and I think it's time for us to break it down, as they used to say.
That is this new Miami English.
And what I mean is that we have seen in what used to be called the newspapers that there is a way of speaking English that has emerged among people who speak Spanish,
Cuban Spanish, in Miami and down the generations.
So there are people who are speaking English this way who are English dominant or maybe even don't speak Spanish.
So there's this new dialect, as it's being called.
It's something that interests a great many people, and it should.
But then on the other hand, the truth is that from a linguistics perspective,
from the perspective of linguistics, as interesting as this development is, it isn't.
unexpected.
I want to situate this Miami dialect within what you could call the theory of language contact.
The study is by Philip Carter at Florida International University,
assisted by Kristen D'Alessandro-Merry.
And the context in terms of geography and sociology is that Miami is an extremely bilingual city.
I think I've been maybe Maybe one time,
and I remember thinking that it is as utterly bilingual as New York City.