Dominican Republic Culture & Language

Dominican culture is the product of the first place in the Americas where Europe, Africa and the indigenous Caribbean met, and the mixture is audible in everything.

Firsts

Santo Domingo, founded in 1498, holds the first cathedral, the first university, the first hospital and the first paved street built by Europeans in the hemisphere. The Zona Colonial is UNESCO-listed, and the grid the Spanish laid out there was copied across the empire.

The music

Merengue and bachata both originated here and both are UNESCO-listed. Merengue became the national music under Trujillo, who promoted it deliberately; bachata was the music of the countryside and the poor, scorned by radio for decades, and is now heard worldwide. The instruments — accordion, tambora, guira — are themselves the mixture: European, African and Taino in origin.

The Taino inheritance

The indigenous population was destroyed within decades of contact, but the language left words that travelled into English — hurricane, canoe, barbecue, hammock, tobacco — and the cassava bread and rock art remain.

Writing

Julia Alvarez and Junot Diaz, both writing from the diaspora, have made the Trujillo years and the migration to the United States widely read.

The Trujillo years

Rafael Trujillo ruled from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, in one of the most complete personality cults the hemisphere has produced — the capital was renamed after him, his name was on churches and mountains, and the secret police reached into every town. The period ended with the 1937 massacre of Haitians along the border still unresolved in national memory, and it is the subject much of the country’s best-known writing keeps returning to.

Food

La bandera — rice, beans and stewed meat — eaten at midday, sancocho stew, mangu of mashed plantain for breakfast, and mamajuana, rum steeped with bark and herbs.

Spanish is the language, in a Caribbean variety that drops final s sounds and runs words together, and is considered one of the faster dialects. Local vocabulary is extensive.

English is widely spoken in the resort areas, by tour staff and in Santo Domingo’s tourism trade, and much less so elsewhere. In the mountains, the south-west and ordinary neighbourhoods, some Spanish makes a real difference.

Haitian Creole is spoken by a substantial population near the border and among migrant workers.

In Samana, a small community descended from nineteenth-century African American settlers has historically spoken a form of English.

Useful: buenos dias, gracias, por favor, cuanto cuesta for how much, que lo que as the local greeting, and una fria for a cold beer.