This Central American republic gained independence from Spain back in 1821, but the official language of Nicaragua is Spanish. The indigenous population was destroyed as a result of colonization, as were the languages of the local Indian tribes.
Some statistics and facts
- The population of the republic in 2015 exceeded 6 million people.
- The vast majority of the country's citizens speak the state language of Nicaragua. Native American dialects are preferred by only one and a half percent of the population.
- Blacks on the east coast use the local dialect of English. Less than one percent of citizens speak it.
- There are tens of thousands of native speakers of Garifuna, Manga, Miskito, Rama and Ulwa.
- Nicaragua is a fairly multinational country, and immigrants prefer their native languages - Chinese, German, Italian and Arabic - as their home languages.
Nicaraguan Spanish
The official language in Nicaragua is quite different from the literary Spanish, which is spoken in Europe and even in the neighboring countries of Central America. The peculiarities of phonology do not allow us to say that Nicaraguan Spanish is identical even to other Caribbean dialects. Many borrowings in Nicaraguan Spanish have been preserved from the local Indian languages and Creole dialects.
Miskito and its features
In Nicaragua, there are several thousand representatives of the Miskito people who have lived on the Caribbean coast for the past few centuries. The Miskito people were formed from the mixed marriages of the Bavican Indians with black slaves brought by the colonialists to work on plantations in the 17th-18th centuries. The Miskito language is one of the most widely spoken unofficial languages in the country.
According to researchers, the Miskito language is still considered native in Nicaragua by about 150 thousand people. Its main distinguishing features are many loanwords from English and Creole dialects.
Tourist notes
Nicaragua is not the most developed country in the region, although tourism is gaining momentum here very rapidly. Going on the road, stock up on a Russian-Spanish phrasebook, because English-speaking Nicaraguans in nature almost do not exist even among the staff of hotels and restaurants in the capital. For sightseeing, it's best to join an organized guided tour with an English-speaking guide.
