By the mid-nineteenth century, the number of Africans on the island was so high that the white population was a minority. We should add that the first Spanish immigrants were mostly from the Canary Islands and Andalucía and had the typical features of these places in their way of speaking such as the lisp or the weakening of the “s” at the end of words.Īs well as all of this, there was also an important African influence due to the great number of slaves who came to Cuba with the colonizers. However, their languages also had significant impacts on the Cuban way of speaking, and we can find their footprints in the names of different buildings, places, foods and objects of everyday life (jaba < bag).Īlso, many of the Spanish settlers who came to live in Cuba had lived in the West Indies, and as such their accents also showed Caribbean features.
The island was occupied by indigenous Taino and Siboney and Guanahatabey people who disappeared during the early stages of colonization for different reasons such as new diseases introduced by the colonizers and the mistreatment of these diseases, among other things. The island of Cuba, along with Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, were the first places the Spanish colonizers arrived in the Americas and from there they made expeditions to the continent.
To understand Cuban Spanish today, we need to look at history.
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