It's Not Quite Spanish Or Cuban.
J.J. Revuelta's rude awakening came when he left his Southwest Miami-Dade home for the University of Florida in Gainesville.
Some strangers from up north gave Victor Morillo the shocking news during a cruise.
And Rod Mendoza was 19 before someone broke it to him, just last week.
"I have an accent?" he asked, in the surprised but suspicious tone of someone who's just been told his parents have been putting the presents under the Christmas tree. "I don't get outside of Miami, so I never noticed this accent. I notice French accents."
But the subtle way Mendoza turned words such as "that" and "there" into "dat" and "dare" and the way his "emphasize" became "emphasise" gave him away. Mendoza, like his buddies Revuelta and Morillo, has the so-called Miami accent.
Even though South Florida is about as far south as you can get, the Miami accent is by no means a Southern drawl. Many outsiders who hear it think it's a Spanish or Cuban accent, but it's not quite that either.
"It's a cadence, a rhythm that's superimposed on the English, that is borrowed from Spanish-speaking, even if they're not speakers of Spanish," said Norene Bini, a dialogue and dialect coach in North Miami who not only confirms the presence of the Miami accent but also gets paid by aspiring actors who want help neutralizing theirs. "The flavor of it is infused in their English, even though their English might be perfect."
Many people with the accent speak fluent English and have spent most, if not all, of their lives in the United States. Many of those whose speech is flavored with the Miami sound think they're speaking with no accent at all.
Having grown up in Spanish-speaking homes, or having been surrounded by Spanish speakers, however, they've developed a way of talking that imposes Spanish pronunciation rules on English. The result can be jarring to the ear -- a Spanish-sounding "d," for example, formed by thrusting the tongue forward rather than keeping it firmly behind the teeth, or an inappropriately rolled "r" on such words as "three."
"The sounds of the language in Spanish are very up front and very formed with the lips," Bini said. "In neutral English it's in the middle of the mouth and back."
With the Miami accent, she said, "there's too much lip action, almost, and too much forward thrust of the sound."
People with the Miami accent also sound as if they're putting the stress on the wrong syllables in English or their sentences come out incrementally, ending up higher than where they began, and also sounding somewhat choppy.
"There's millions of little things involved," said Bini, who was raised in Venezuela and studied languages at the University of South Florida.
Describing the accent is tough, however, even for people who realize they have it. "It's different," said Revuelta, a UF junior studying electrical engineering. "It's got a Latin flavor."
For Martin Amado, a Cuban-American born and raised in Miami, words like "family" tripped him up, perhaps because of the Spanish, familia.
"Fa-MEE-lee," he says, imitating the way he used to pronounce the word.
After working with Bini to soften his accent, Amado learned to try to say it as two syllables rather than three to achieve the "neutral English" sound, an approach that's designed to make it difficult to determine where the speaker hails from. Amado, who lives in Sunrise, turned to the dialect lessons to further his broadcasting and acting career. His agent, who sent his broadcast audition tapes around the country, told him potential employers had questions about the way he talked.
"Their issue was `We detect a slight Hispanic accent,'" he said. "This whole time I thought, hey, I speak proper English."
Amado said he's bothered that having a "Hispanic accent" could affect his ability to get work as a broadcaster or even as an actor. He notes that there are certainly successful people with the Miami accent, among them singer Gloria Estefan. Some South Florida broadcasters and television hosts also have it, he said.
"It's a conflict for me," he said. "It's your culture. You shouldn't deny that."
Morillo, also Hispanic, is a bit confused that people think he has an accent. He came to the United States from Venezuela when he was just a few months old.
"I have an accent when I speak Spanish, too," he said. "I have an English accent. They say I sound like a gringo, right? Then when I speak English I don't sound like a gringo. So it's kind of weird in that sense. You don't belong to anything."
By Madeline BarM-s Diaz Miami Bureau
Sun-Sentinel
