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The Dominican Republic is an island nation in the Caribbean with an estimated population of nearly 9.4 million. spanish is the official language and is spoken by the vast majority of the population, with a small number of Haitian Creole speakers. For this article the focus will be on the native spanish speakers.
One of the most common pronunciation problems for Dominicans, as with most standard spanish speakers, is that they turn ll (double L) into a /?/ in their language and believe it to be the same in ours. This causes them to pronounce words such as call or mall as cy or my, the latter leading to much confusion for the uninformed english speaker. An example of a sentence which could come of that would be, “I wan to go to deh my.”
The problem which the Dominicans have that isn't seen in other spanish dialects is that they drop the letter S in nearly every word. It tends to become a voiceless glottal fricative at the ends of syllables, something along the lines of [h]. This phenomenon inevitably leads to entire syllables disappearing from words. They then tend to link different words into one big word to make up the difference. “Those markers are mine,” turns into, “thoemarka mine.” This is surely a calamity to the outside world!
Overcompensation for the loss of the letter S is common in and around Santiago, a city of the Dominican Republic known for holding itself in high regard. The residents of Santiago attempt to balance out their counter-parts' loss by throwing in way to many S's. We are left with both an eye and ear sore: sthose smarksers ares smines
When the letter R comes at the end of a word it gets replaced with an L in most cases. This is true of most residents in the southeast Dominican Republic, mainly in La Romana and San Pedro. The result is a spanish word such as mar (ocean) becomes mal (bad) which is confusing to someone visiting from another spanish-speaking country such as spain. This does not often carry over into english for the majority of speakers.
With the younger generation, people have started deconstructing the syllable coda. This is thought to be Cuban in origin and inspired by the increasing popularity of Havana's booming musical exportation. When a consonant is followed by a vowel in a one syllable word, that vowel tends to fall by the wayside. The most infamous example is with our indefinite article an losing its N to turn into the other indefinite article a even in places where it does not make sense. The N does not completely go away; it can be heard as an unvoiced glottal fricative similar to [h] as with the dropped S in other instances.
From corrupted L's to disruptive S's, from fallen R's to ill-gotten A's; Dominicans have certainly picked up a lot of different and sometimes contradictory pronunciation patterns. While some of the problems they face with english acquisition are common along the entire spanish plateau, many issues are unique to the Dominicans. One thing is for sure, Englihtake practice!
