Like in a Drop of Water: colloquial Cuban Spanish in just one Joke

Abstract

Cuban Spanish, its colloquial variety included, is quite a peculiar, perhaps a unique phenomenon. Fruit of the unique history of the Cuban ethnic community, the Cuban colloquial speech has become an amalgam of imprints of many languages, as well as of a host of ethnic and religious traditions. Here, as nowhere else in the Western Hemisphere, with the exception, perhaps, of Brazil, the African heritage stayed very much alive and came afloat first in the language of the Afro-Cuban community as a whole, and then in Cuban Spanish as such. And yet other sources of colloquial Cuban should also be mentioned: first, the colloquial speech of native Spaniards, which were plenty on the Island before the Revolution of 1959 and contributed a lot to the patterns of word-formation in Cuban; and, finally, two more elements: the Portuguese one and the Gipsy one, as units thereof have found a prominent place among the most commonly used Cuban colloquialisms.

Keywords

• cuban variant
• colloquial speech
• african element
• black slaves
• niger-congolese languages
• secret societies
• mystical cults
• gipsy element
• real-life language creation
• patterns of word-formation