The English language as primarily spoken by Hispanic Americans on the East Coast of the United States demonstrates considerable influence from New York City English and African American Vernacular English, with certain additional features borrowed from the Spanish language. Though not currently confirmed to be a single stabilized dialect, this variety has received some attention in the academic literature, being recently labelled New York Latino English, referring to its city of nineteenth-century origin, or, more inclusively, East Coast Latino English. In the 1970s scholarship, the variety was more narrowly called Puerto Rican English or Nuyorican English. The variety originated with Puerto Ricans moving to New York City after World War I, though particularly in the subsequent generations born in the New York dialect region who were native speakers of both English and often Spanish. Today, it covers the English of many Hispanic Americans of diverse national heritages, not simply Puerto Ricans, in the New York metropolitan area and beyond along the northeastern coast of the United States. According to linguist William Labov, "A thorough and accurate study of geographic differences in the English of Latinos from the Caribbean and various countries of Central and South America is beyond the scope of the current work", largely because "consistent dialect patterns are still in the process of formation". Importantly, this East Coast Latino ethnolect is a native variety of American English and not a form of Spanglish, broken English, or interlanguage, and other ethnic American English dialects are similarly documented. It is not spoken by all Latinos in this region, and it is not spoken only by Latinos. It is sometimes spoken by people who know little or no Spanish.
Phonology
General phonology
Some New York Latino English speakers, the best documented being East Harlem Puerto Rican males with many African American contacts, may be indistinguishable by sound from African American Vernacular English speakers.
New York Latino English utterances may have some degree of syllable-timed rhythms, so syllables take up roughly the same amount of time with roughly the same amount of stress and particularly among older and male speakers. Standard American English is stress-timed, so only stressed syllables are evenly timed, though Spanish is also syllable-timed.
and are realized as dental stops and rather than the standard American and AAVE alveolars and . Dentalization is also common in New York accents, generally, and Latino English is also pronounced dentally as.
is often pronounced, with the possibility of a near-merger among words like thin and tin.
Devoicing of voiced obstruent codas is optional among stronger accents.
Consonant cluster simplifications occur such as the loss of dental stops after nasals and fricatives,. That also leads to a characteristic plural, in which words like tests are pronounced, though this is highly stigmatized and not necessarily common.
in syllable onsets and intervocalically are typically "clear" or "light". This differentiates Latinos from all other ethnic groups in New York. In syllable codas, however, /l/ is often vocalized so that, for instance, soul may approach the sound of so, and tool may approach the sound of too.
Predominantly, pronunciation is variably rhotic, in the same vein as current-day New York City English, African American Vernacular English, and Caribbean Spanish. Cultivated forms may be fully rhotic, particularly among many professional-class Hispanic New Yorkers from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. The R sound, when pronounced, is the typical English postalveolar approximant.
Subcultural variations
As the unity of the dialect is still in transition, in order to enhance their study, Slomanson & Newman grouped their participants based on differences in subcultural participation and identification. The study differentiated between the influential youth groups/subcultures of hip hop, skater/BMX, and geek. The findings located young Latinos mostly in the first two categories. Latinos also largely fell into a third, non-peer-based grouping: family-oriented, whose members show the strongest pride and self-identification with their ethno-cultural heritage. They admittedly did not examine gang culture, which minimally affected their population sample. The study found that the gliding vowel becomes a glideless , so, for example, the wordride approaches the sound of rod, in Latino members of hip hop culture; a middling degree of that was found with the family-oriented group and the least degree of it with the skater/BMX group. Just over 50% of all speakers showed to be backed before coronal consonants, with little variation based on peer groups. For the gliding vowel , just over 50% of speakers show no gliding, except in the skater/BMX group, where this drops to just over 30% of speakers. For the gliding vowel , just over 70% of speakers show no gliding, except in the skater/BMX group, where this drops to less than 50% of speakers. Such instances of glide deletion are indicators of the dialect's contact with Spanish.
Grammar and vocabulary
Similarity of many grammatical structures between New York Latino English and African American Vernacular English is clearly evident.
*Lack of inversion or do support particularly in first- and second-person questions
Calques and direct translations of Spanish expressions and words.
The AAVE and Southern U.S. term you-all or y'all is common.
Notable native speakers
Cardi B — "an Afro-Latina with a thick Bronx accent"
Fat Joe — "Fat Joe is a born and bred Bronxite who still speaks in the singular city accent"
Luis Guzman — "his Nuyorican accent is oh so thick"
La India — "speaking in a gruff Nuyorican accent"
John Leguizamo — "his hardcore New York accent" and "he has a Nuyorican accent he can't shake"
Jennifer Lopez — "Bronx Puerto Rican... when I grew up I talked like this" and "her Nuyorican accent"
Rosie Perez — "she will always be remembered the Nuyorican accent" and "a high-pitched voice with a thick Nuyorican accent"
