Latine Miami
oral posture
Oral posture refers to a dialect or accent's "home base" in terms of articulatory settings - specifically the jaw, the lips, the tongue, the cheeks, and the velum (soft palate).
Some features of the oral posture for a Miami dialect, using as examples Gloria Estefan and Jenny Lorenzo, a Cuban-American comedienne from Miami.
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LIPS: The body of the lips is mostly relaxed, but you might experience some gentle lip corner protrusion and lip rounding, especially when code-switching into Spanish for such vowel sounds as the /o/ in the BOTE lexical set.
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VELUM (soft palate): For Cuban Miamians, the soft palate raises, especially for vowel sounds in the GOAT lexical set. This gives the speaker a hollow oral resonance. You might imagine a golf ball underneath the soft palate.
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CHEEKS: very relaxed
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TONGUE:
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As you listen to the speaker audio samples, you might observe more pronounced rhoticity in this dialect, and that is a result of the action of the tongue––it will slightly retract, or brace into the molars.
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The blade or tip of the tongue is quite active, often making contact with the alveolar ridge for the more Spanish-influenced /L/ pronunciation you might hear in some Miami slang, such as their pronunciation of “literally.”
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JAW: The jaw retains a fairly raised position in conversational speech.
THE MIAMI THINKING SOUND
A great way to find the oral posture of a dialect is through its thinking, or hesitation sound. The target for the Miami thinking sound is a very open, unrounded back vowel. Think about cupping the back body of the tongue to find this vowel. Play the audio sample and see if your tongue can find the shape of this sound.
The Magic Phrase:
Miami Slang and Calques
But when we meet No, we say yes. And we say yes. We say no. Or it's like no, yeah. Or yeah, no.
Chilling, chilling bro
Come on bro, tú sabe bro
Bro what a mission. Oh, I was in traffic what a mission it means like it was just a headache.
And then another one that's very Miami is bro you're eating so much shit.
Yeah, eating shit. And I guess that comes from the Spanish come mierda.