How 5 Decades of Hispanic Immigration Gave Miami Its Own Unique English Dialect

For decades, Florida's most well-known dialect was the one made famous by author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Called "Florida Cracker" by white natives, it's now spoken mostly in the Panhandle and a few other shrinking spots throughout the rest of the state. But it turns out that at the very same time the cracker dialect was declining (thanks largely to in-migration from other parts of the country), Miami was developing a dialect so distinct from the rest of the state that residents of Broward County (only one county north of Miami-Dade) are capable of noticing the difference.

The Miami Herald explains how five decades of migration from Cuba, the Caribbean, and Central America makes the city's dialect unique: