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Article published In:
English World-Wide
Vol. 44:2 (2023) ► pp.219–250

Spanish-influenced lexical phenomena in emerging Miami English

Tracking production and perception

| Florida International University
| University at Buffalo

This study considers the role of Spanish-to-English calques in a variety of English that has developed alongside Spanish in Miami (U.S.). Data were obtained from three sources: (1) a production experiment (translation task) conducted with two generations of Cuban Americans, (2) a perception experiment (acceptability task) conducted with Miami-based raters and raters from a national audience using Mechanical Turk, and (3) calques and related lexico-semantic phenomena culled from a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews conducted with Latinx college students. Results of the production task show that Spanish-dominant participants make robust use of calque expressions; second-generation participants use them less. Results of mixed linear effects regression analysis show that Miamians perceive of local expressions more favorably than national participants, though like national raters rank non-calque expressions more highly than calques. The approval of the Miami raters to the local expressions was driven primarily by six test items: (e.g. get down from the car).

Keywords: calques, language contact, Spanish, English, Miami
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Sociolinguistic context
    • 2.1Historical development of Spanish / English bilingualism in Miami
    • 2.2Metalinguistic awareness of Contact Phenomena in Miami
  • 3.Production task
    • 3.1Instrument and methods
    • 3.2Participants
    • 3.3Production task results
  • 4.Perception task
    • 4.1Participants and methods
    • 4.2Perception results
  • 5.Calque expressions in interview data
  • 6.Discussion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.22036.car
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