Florida Culture & Language

Florida is less a single culture than several that happen to share a peninsula. Miami is majority Hispanic and functions as a capital of the Americas — Cuban, Haitian, Colombian, Venezuelan and Brazilian communities, with Spanish as a working language.

The panhandle in the north is culturally the Deep South, closer to Alabama than to anywhere further down the peninsula. The Gulf coast and the centre are heavily shaped by retirement migration from the Midwest and Northeast.

The Seminole and Miccosukee tribes maintain sovereign lands in and around the Everglades, and the Seminole in particular have built substantial enterprises on that status.

Art Deco gives Miami Beach its identity — the largest concentration of 1920s and 1930s resort architecture anywhere, saved from demolition by a preservation campaign in the 1970s and 1980s.

English is universal, but Spanish is a genuine working language in the south — in Miami-Dade the majority of residents speak it at home, and getting by in Spanish alone is entirely possible.

Haitian Creole is widely spoken in the southeast, and Portuguese in parts of the Atlantic coast.

Local usage worth knowing: the Keys call themselves the Conch Republic and a native is a Conch; snowbirds are the winter residents from the north; and the theme park area is simply the parks. A cafecito is the small sweet espresso, and asking for one is the normal afternoon transaction in Miami.