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Consequently, many American English words are now found in the Puerto Rican vocabulary. English has had a fluctuating status as a second official language of the Island, depending on the political party in power at the moment. The majority of Puerto Ricans today do not speak English at home, and Spanish remains the mother tongue of Puerto Ricans.
This article is a summary of common slang words and phrases used in Puerto Rico. Idiomatic expressions may be difficult to translate fully and may have multiple meanings, so the English translations below may not reflect the full meaning of the expression they intend to translate.
The naming customs of Hispanic America are similar to the Spanish naming customs practiced in Spain, with some modifications to the surname rules.Many Hispanophones in the countries of Spanish-speaking America have two given names, plus like in Spain, a paternal surname (primer apellido or apellido paterno) and a maternal surname (segundo apellido or apellido materno).
Chicano English is sometimes mistakenly conflated with Spanglish, which is a mixing of Spanish and English; however, Chicano English is a fully formed and native dialect of English, not a "learner English" or interlanguage. It is even the native dialect of some speakers who know little to no Spanish, or have no Mexican heritage.
Mama and papa use speech sounds that are among the easiest to produce: bilabial consonants like /m/, /p/, and /b/, and the open vowel /a/.They are, therefore, often among the first word-like sounds made by babbling babies (babble words), and parents tend to associate the first sound babies make with themselves and to employ them subsequently as part of their baby-talk lexicon.
Predominantly, pronunciation is variably rhotic (in other words, pronouncing the R sound only between and before vowels, but not consistently after vowels), [14] in the same vein as current-day New York City English, African-American Vernacular English, and Caribbean Spanish (wherein word-final /r/ is silent). Cultivated forms may be fully ...
The name fromlostiano comes from the expression From Lost to the River, which is a word-for-word translation of de perdidos al río; an idiom that means that one is prone to choose a particularly risky action in a desperate situation (this is somewhat comparable to the English idiom in for a penny, in for a pound). The humor comes from the fact ...
Some sources from the United States believe that the word spic is a play on a Spanish-accented pronunciation of the English word speak. [1] [2] [3] The Oxford English Dictionary takes spic to be a contraction of the earlier form spiggoty. [4]