On the Influence of British/American English in the Dominican Society/A Revisited Edition

Abstract

The present work is a historical/linguistic account of an unprecedented fact regarding the existence of two English Speaking Communities [British English and American English], in our country the Dominican Republic, where Spanish is the official and most used language, to the extent of being considered a monolingual nation or country. It is analyzed here, on how the Hispaniola Island was split into two different territories due to different treaties (Aranjuez, Ryswick, among others), held in the old European Metropolis and how the island came to be a French Colony (the territory of what is Haiti now), a Haitian Creole/French speaking country to the West, and the Dominican Republic, a Spanish speaking country to the East of the Isla Hispaniola. The main goal or objective it is not only the historical facts ad events that conspired to produce two countries out of one island, but how by some other historical and linguistic circumstances the Dominican Nation ended up in harboring two English speaking communities in its territory, by means of the settlement occurred in the cities of Samana, and those of Puerto Plata and San Pedro de Macorix, where as a direct consequence of those human settlements, historically distant, one from the other, British English and American English were established in a permanent way. And testing, to a certain extent, the pass of the time. One of the aspect treated in this research, was in determining, in the lights of the most enlightening linguistic theories and historical accounts, not only of the differences between British English and American English as World English Languages of extreme importance for today's influenced society, the society of knowledge and of globalization, but also how this historical fact later the Dominican education system, in terms of the EFLTeaching/Learning Process at the college level. specifically at the Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo, where surveys shown an enormous influence on students interviewed who were born in those cities. But this task would have been incomplete if they were not analyzed, on how those referred languages were transplanted into the very heart of a monolingual society, thus enriching and diversifying its language and culture, and thus influencing the learning process of the English language at our universities.