Dominican Spanish

Dominican Spanish is Spanish as spoken in the Dominican Republic; and also among the Dominican diaspora, most of whom live in the United States, chiefly in New York City, Boston, and Miami.

Dominican Spanish is similar to other Caribbean Spanish or Coastal Caribbean Spanish language vernaculars, as well as Canarian Spanish (Canary Islands of Spain) and Andalusian Spanish (Andalucia, southern Spain). Speakers of Dominican Spanish may also use several Spanish archaisms.

Dominican Spanish is based on the Andalusian and Canarian Spanish dialects of southern Spain, and has borrowed vocabulary from the Taíno language. Cibaenian Spanish is a mixture between the dialect spoken by 16th and 17th century Portuguese colonists in the Cibao valley, with the dialect spoken by the 18th century Canarian settlers.

Most of the Spanish-speaking settlers came from Andalusia (southern Spain) and the Canary Islands. When they first arrived in what is now the Dominican Republic, the first native people they had contact with were the Arawak-speaking Taino people.

Spanish, just as in other Latin American countries, completely replaced the indigenous languages (Taíno and the language of the Ciguayos) of the Dominican Republic to the point where they became entirely extinct, mainly due to the fact that the majority of the indigenous population quickly died out only a few years after European contact.

However, when the Spanish arrived, they found the flora and fauna of the island, as well as various cultural artifacts, very different from those of Spain, so many of the words used by the natives to name these things were conserved and assimilated, thereby enriching Spanish lexicon. Some of these words include: ají, anón, batata, barbacoa, bejuco, bija, caiman, canoa, caoba, conuco, guanábana, guayaba, hamaca, hobo (jobo), jagua, maní, papaya (lechosa), sabana, yuca.

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