Why megastar Bad Bunny sings in Puerto Rican Spanish

Bad Bunny is on a roll. Among the three wins at the 68th Grammy Awards, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (I should have taken more pictures) became the first Spanish-language record to win Album of the Year.

On Sunday, Bad Bunny will be the first Latino and Spanish-speaking artist to perform as a solo headliner at the Super Bowl halftime show.

Born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, and raised in Borinquen (the Taíno-language name for Puerto Rico), Bad Bunny’s life and music have been marked by political, social and economic crises affecting the archipelago: government corruption, failing infrastructure and debt.

Bad Bunny has used his voice to protest in both his music and public statements against national crises and the ongoing effects of colonialism, while celebrating Latinx and Puerto Rican identities.

Bad Bunny started posting songs on SoundCloud in 2016. In 2018, he released his first album, X 100PRE. Sung in Spanish, the album reached number 11 on the Billboard charts.

His third album, 2020’s El último tour del mundo (The Last World Tour), became the first Spanish-language album to reach number one on the Billboard charts. His fourth record, 2022’s Un Verano Sin Ti (A Summer Without You), also topped this chart, this time for 13 weeks.

DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS stands out against Bad Bunny’s previous albums for its focus on Puerto Rican identity and ongoing fight against colonisation. This is reflected in the album through national symbols, genres and, of course, language. Bad Bunny addresses these themes through companion videos explaining central aspects to the collective memory of Puerto Rico.

The current climate in the United States of interventionism and mass deportations, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS has made the domestic Puerto Rican experience resonate among global audiences.

Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory that belongs to the US, and Puerto Ricans are US citizens, but the territory is not counted as one of the country’s states. The US exerts control over the military, politics and economy of the archipelago.

Spanish plays a complex role in Puerto Rico, as a colonial language that was imposed in the archipelago. More recently, Spanish has been embraced as a resistance to English dominance.

Bad Bunny speaks Puerto Rican Spanish, which combines influences from the indigenous Taíno language, African languages, Spanish and English. Studies have found that Spanish speakers may consider this variety as incorrect because its characteristics are seen as distant from the Castilian Spanish norm: perceptions anchored in colonial ideologies that privilege Castilian Spanish.

Among other genres, Bad Bunny sings reggaeton, a Caribbean genre that draws on Jamaican dancehall, American hip-hop and Dominican Republic dembow.

Reggaeton is a popular music genre with underground roots and explicit lyrics. In the 1990s, Puerto Rican reggaeton was subject to government prosecution (including confiscation, fines and negative media campaigns) due to its alleged obscenity. That did not stop its increasing popularity among young audiences in the Caribbean and beyond.

The international popularity of reggaeton artists such as Don Omar, Daddy Yankee, Young Miko, Ozuna and Bad Bunny has changed the perception of Puerto Rican Spanish from a history of deficit views to more social prestige. In the past, the distance from the Castilian Spanish norm was considered something negative, but there is now a strong interest among students of Spanish to learn this variety.

Bad Bunny’s language does not reflect a purist vision of language with rigid boundaries. Instead, he embraces a creative use of language with fluid boundaries.

The Puerto Rican slang Bad Bunny uses on DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS features numerous Anglicisms, or words borrowed from English – a feature of Puerto Rican Spanish.

He uses unadapted borrowings – such as the words shot, pitcher, flashback, follow, blondie, glossy, brother, bestie, eyelash, underwater and movie. And he also uses hybrid realisations, compound words that combine English and Spanish components such as janguear (adapted from the English “hang out”), girla (girl), ghosteó (ghosted), stalkeándote (stalking) and kloufrens (close friends).

Bad Bunny embraces his Puerto Rican identity in the pronunciation of lyrics and in public commentary. For example, he pronounces the letter “r” as the letter “l” in songs like 'NUEVAYoL' (New York) and 'VeLDÁ' (Truth).

The letter “l” becomes a strong identity feature of NUEVAYoL when compared to other iconic renditions of the city, such as those of Frank Sinatra.

By using his voice to celebrate characteristics of Puerto Rican Spanish previously not perceived as prestigious, Bad Bunny is contributing to the values of linguistic diversity and fighting language ideologies inherited from colonialism.

The way Bad Bunny uses language has been described as an act of defiance and survival. Bad Bunny does not break down language and make it easier for listeners. Rather, listeners have to make the effort of decoding it.

Notably, the lexicographer Maia Sherwood Droz created a Spanish dictionary for DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, including definitions of words, phrases and cultural references to decode the meanings in the album.

In an album loaded with references to the ongoing fight to preserve Puerto Rican identity, he evokes community symbols of “pitorro de coco” (homemade clandestine rum) to “la bandera azul clarito” (the light blue flag, referring to a 1895 Puerto Rican emblem.

When accepting an award at the Grammys, Bad Bunny said:

We’re not savage. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.

Bad Bunny’s acceptance speech is explicitly rejecting dehumanisation in a ceremony where, finally, music in languages other than English and, importantly, in Puerto Rican Spanish, was honoured and celebrated as the best album of the year.

*Beatriz Carbajal-Carrera is a Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Sydney.