"What's noteworthy about Miami English is that we're now in a third, even fourth generation of kids who are using these features of native dialect," said Florida International University sociolinguist Phillip Carter, who studies language in U.S. Latino communities. "So we're not talking — and let me be clear — we're not talking about non-native features. These are native speakers of English who have learned a variety influenced historically by Spanish."
-from Saturday's Miami Herald, an article well worth a read.
Supposuvly, it's not just an accent, it is a true dialect, irregardless of what you might think.
More from the article:
Miami has always been home to Latin American immigrants, but the first sizable wave arrived from Cuba during the 1960s, followed by the Mariel influx of the 1980s and then the balseros of the 1990s. They were joined by political refugees fleeing regimes in Nicaragua and Venezuela and by immigrants from Colombia and Mexico and other countries to the south.
Immigrants overwhelmed the city's population so quickly that before long children growing up in Miami were learning English from people who were not native English speakers themselves. This led to a number of nonnative features like Spanish vowels and "L" sounds being incorporated into the language.
The first sizable wave of Stokes kids arrived in the 70s and early 80s.
On one of the first telephone calls from Macon after his arrival Freshman year at Davidson, he said, "Dad, I feel like a Cuban!" I said, something like "you are a Cuban; you just happen to look like everyone else up there."
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