Few would doubt Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution in Cuba transformed the look of Miami. The city’s vibrant Latin music and dance scene, thriving Cuban coffee bars, cigar shops, restaurants and colorful street art can all be credited to the wealth of culture that crossed the Florida Straits with the hundreds of thousands fleeing the island’s new communist regime.
Those changes, it turns out, also extend to the way Miami sounds. According to linguistic analysts at Florida International University’s center for the humanities in an urban environment, a new dialect has evolved blending Spanish meanings and English words into a colloquial form of language readily understood here by those who speak and hear it, but which just sounds “off” to the majority of English-speaking Americans.
