Bad Bunny is currently one of the most-streamed artists in the world. agustin.photo/ShutterstockAccording to the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE, under its Spanish acronym), a “piquete” is either a sharp object, a small wound, or a group of striking workers blocking access to a workplace. It is a word, generally speaking, of conflict and harm. But when Puerto Rican musician Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio – more commonly known as Bad Bunny – intones on his song NUEVAYoL “Tú tiene’ piquete mami, yo también” (“You’ve got piquete mami, and so do I”), he is not talking about trade unions or pointy sticks. He is referring to something else altogether, a way of moving through the world with a certain self confidence, attitude and style. In Puerto Rico’s boricua dialect, the meaning of piquete is totally divorced from the RAE’s official uses. But unapologetic use of his native dialect is what defines the music of the world’s biggest Spanish-language musician. Bad Bunny has put Spanish on more global stages than any other artist in recent history, yet he is also widely criticised for his way of speaking. This is rife on social media, where users complain that he “doesn’t talk properly”, he is “deforming the language”, and “doesn’t enunciate clearly”. But these critiques say much more about the narrow confines of “proper Spanish” and its place in the world than about how one particular artist speaks. Leer más: Who is Bad Bunny? Why the biggest music star in the world sings in Puerto Rican Spanish ‘Las termino con la L, con la R suenan mal’Comments like these point to a linguistic clash: on one side what was, until recently, regarded as standard, codified, academic Spanish; on the other, the Spanish spoken on the street corners of Puerto Rico, in the voice notes sent across any Latin American city, and in countless neighbourhoods across the US, Spain and beyond. It is from this latter perspective that Bad Bunny expresses himself.Since his earliest hits, criticism has focused on the dialect he uses. Certain aspects of his Caribbean Spanish – aspirating or leaving out final consonants, boricua slang, “Spanglish” vocabulary, and replacing the rolled Spanish “r” with “l” in certain positions – have been held up as examples of his supposedly “bad” Spanish. ‘La gente tiene que dejal de sel tan estúpido y pensal que conocen la vida de lo’ famoso’‘, Bad Bunny sings on ‘Nadie sabe’. However, what was once perceived as local or marginal has quickly become a global phenomenon. Today, millions of people around the world now recognise and use typically Puerto Rican expressions, pronunciations and structures – not necessarily because they understand their nuances, but because they form part of a recognisable cultural identity.According to data from our report on Bad Bunny’s impact on global Spanish, after Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl half-time show, songs like NUEVAYoL were searched for on Shazam around the world, including in Germany, Italy, France and the UK. In other words, listeners in non-Spanish-speaking markets who may not fully understand the language were consuming and actively searching for his music.For much of the world, the singer has managed to upend decades of prejudice surrounding urban Latin music. ‘Baby, tú lo hace’ como si supiera’With Bad Bunny’s linguistic impact reshaping Spanish as a whole, can people learn to accept the music whilst rejecting the accent?Sheila Rodríguez Madera is a researcher specialising in socio-cultural studies on Puerto Rico, and co-authored the 2024 book The Bad Bunny Enigma. She argues that: “[Bad Bunny] does not disavow Puerto Rico’s colonial condition; rather, he performatizes it. Working within colonial structures—the global cultural industry and the North American market — he subverts them from within by asserting his accent, his slang, and his local perspective. This tension positions him as a figure of symbolic resistance: through songs such as ‘El Apagón,’ he makes visible the island’s precarity and the extraction of its energy resources, even as he expands the possibilities of what spectacle can accomplish.”By singing and speaking in distinctly Puerto Rican Spanish on primetime TV in the US, at the Grammies, the Oscars, and the Super Bowl, Bad Bunny is not refusing to adapt and meet the demands of Anglophone listeners and markets. On the contrary, it proves that his music can reach them without any need for translation. The same cannot be said for previous Latin American music stars. For decades, any Latin artist who wanted to reach international audiences had to release music in English (or a mixture of Spanish and English). But Bad Bunny’s catalogue is exclusively in Spanish, and he uses a mixture of English and Spanish in his public appearances to make himself understood. His lyrics do include common boricua English slang and expressions, but most would be unrecognisable to English speakers: “janguear”, for example, is derived from “hang out”. Bad Bunny’s Tiny Desk Concert, produced by US public broadcaster NPR. This idea, which has been explored in depth by the Cuban-American linguist Ofelia García, refers to the practice of bilingual or multilingual speakers who draw on a single, fluid linguistic repertoire, without treating their languages as sealed, segregated compartments. It is not merely a question of code-switching, but a way of engaging with language that reflects complex life stories, hybrid identities, and histories of migration and resistance. Bad Bunny can be understood in this light. He does not adapt his language to suit the global market – he has instead shifted the conditions of what can be understood within that market.‘Now everyone wants to be latino, pero les falta sazón’On February 18, 2026, the Puerto Rican Academy of Letters honoured Bad Bunny for his “contribution to the global dissemination of the Spanish language”. Its reasons were very clear:“Martínez Ocasio’s cultural output has helped to overcome prejudices against the forms of communication characteristic of popular, urban and youth dialects, or those influenced by other languages. Despite the distinctly local nature of the references and linguistic forms used in his works, his message has managed to transcend geographical, national, generational and ideological boundaries”.The Academy thus recognised the singer for his way of speaking, not in spite of it. If the purpose of a language is to communicate and foster a sense of community, Benito Martínez Ocasio’s impact is undeniable. He has succeeded in making words like bellaquera, chambear and piquete understood from Madrid to Tokyo, and in gaining acceptance among a global audience. Leer más: Rosalía: raising reggaetón’s ‘global cachet’ or robbing it of its roots? However, as Dr Nathaly Gómez Gómez highlights in our study: “It is not enough for the market to open up to Spanish-speaking voices; we must also ask ourselves which variety of Spanish we are talking about, from which territories, under which aesthetic frameworks, and which bodies are once again becoming dominant.” Her argument is that this expansion may consolidate a Caribbean and Puerto Rican hegemony within the Spanish language, leaving out the diversity of other Latin American dialects. “Rather than broadening plurality,” she says, “the system may end up encouraging other versions of the same thing and reinforcing a hegemonic idea of what it means to be Latin.”Bad Bunny’s success should therefore prompt us to check our ideas of neutrality in the spread of Spanish, while also moving away from linguistic elitism. However, the data and cultural evidence cannot be ignored: the Spanish heard by most people around the world is not the RAE’s “standard”, but the dialect of a Caribbean island with a population of three million. Certain segments of Spanish society may read this as a sign of decline or marginalisation. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth: it is proof of our language’s extraordinary health and elasticity, and grants modern-day Spanish the kind of piquete that can only come from the streets. A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!Lourdes Moreno Cazalla no recibe salario, ni ejerce labores de consultoría, ni posee acciones, ni recibe financiación de ninguna compañía u organización que pueda obtener beneficio de este artículo, y ha declarado carecer de vínculos relevantes más allá del cargo académico citado.