Seseo, where and merge to, as in the rest of the Americas, in the Canary Islands and in southern Spain.
Yeísmo, where and merge to, as in many other Spanish dialects.
is debuccalized to at the end of syllables, as is common in the southern half of Spain, the Canaries and much of Spanish America: los amigos , dos .
Syllable-initial is also sporadically debuccalized, although this process is documented only in certain areas, such as parts of Puerto Rico: cinco centavos, la semana pasada .
pronounced, as is common in Andalusia, the Canary islands and various parts of South America.
lenition of to mucho→, as in part of Andalusia or in Chile.
Word-final is realized as a velar nasal . It can be elided, with backwards nasalization of the preceding vowel: →; as in part of Andalusia.
Deletion of intervocalic and word final, as in many Spanish dialects: cansado , nada →, and perdido , mitad →
Several neutralizations also occur in the syllable coda. The liquids and may neutralize to , , or as complete regressive assimilation. The deletions and neutralizations show variability in their occurrence, even with the same speaker in the same utterance, which implies that nondeleted forms exist in the underlying structure. That is not to say that these dialects are on the path to eliminating coda consonants since such processes have existed for more than four centuries in these dialects. argues that it is the result of speakers acquiring multiple phonological systems with uneven control, like that of second language learners.
In Spanish there are geminated consonants in Caribbean Spanish when /l/ and /ɾ/ in syllabic coda are assimilated to the following consonant. Examples of Cuban Spanish:
Morphology
As in all American variants of Spanish the third person plural pronoun ustedes has supplanted the pronoun vosotros/vosotras.
Voseo is now completely absent from insular Caribbean Spanish. Contemporary commentators such as the Cuban Esteban Pichardo speak of its survival as late as the 1830s but by the 1870s it appears to have become confined to a small number of speakers from the lowest social strata. In the north west of Venezuela, in the states of Falcon and Zulia, in the north of the Cesar department, in the south of La Guajira department on Colombia's Atlantic coast and the Azurero Peninsula in Panama voseo is still used.
The diminutive takes the form after : pato→patico, pregunta→preguntica. BUT perro→perrito.
Possibly as a result of the routine elision of word-final, some speakers may use as a plural marker, but generally this tendency is limited to words with singular forms that end in a stressed vowel: café ‘coffee’ → ‘coffees’, sofá ‘sofa’ → ‘sofas’.
Syntax
Vocabulary
The second-person subject pronouns, tú and usted, are used more frequently than in other varieties of Spanish, contrary to the general Spanish tendency to omit them when meaning is clear from the context. Thus, tú estás hablando instead of estás hablando. The tendency is strongest in the island countries and, on the mainland, in Nicaragua, where voseo is predominant.
So-called "wh-questions", which in standard Spanish are marked by subject/verb inversion, often appear without the inversion in Caribbean Spanish: "¿Qué tú quieres?" for standard "¿Qué quieres ?".
