Arawak language
Spanish is the official language in the Dominican Republic. The country has a variety of accents most of which derive from the Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands and western Andalusia of southern Spain. The accent spoken in the Cibao region is a mixture of two dialects: that of the 16th- and 17th-century Portuguese colonists in the Cibao valley, and that of the 18th-century Canarian settlers. Dominican Spanish also has borrowed vocabularies from the Arawak language. Some common words derived from the Taino natives include: "barbecue", "canoe", "caribbean", "hammock", "hurricane", "iguana", "manatee", "mangrove", "savannah", and "tobacco" among others.