<P> Numerous immigrants have come from other Caribbean countries, as the country has offered economic opportunities . There are about 32,000 Jamaicans living in the Dominican Republic . There is an increasing number of Puerto Rican immigrants, especially in and around Santo Domingo; they are believed to number around 10,000 . There are over 700,000 people of Haitian descent, including a generation born in the Dominican Republic . </P> <P> East Asians, primarily ethnic Chinese and Japanese, can also be found . Europeans are represented mostly by Spanish whites but also with smaller populations of German Jews, Italians, Portuguese, British, Dutch, Danes, and Hungarians . Some converted Sephardic Jews from Spain were part of early expeditions; only Catholics were allowed to come to the New World . Later there were Jewish migrants coming from Iberia and Europe in the 1700s . Some managed to reach the Caribbean as refugees during and after the Second World War . Some Sephardic Jews reside in Sosúa while others are dispersed throughout the country . Self - identified Jews number about 3,000; other Dominicans may have some Jewish ancestry because of marriages among converted Jewish Catholics and other Dominicans since the colonial years . Some Dominicans born in the United States now reside in the Dominican Republic, creating a kind of expatriate community . </P> <P> The population of the Dominican Republic is mostly Spanish - speaking . The local variant of Spanish is called Dominican Spanish, which closely resembles other Spanish vernaculars in the Caribbean and the Canarian Spanish . In addition, it borrowed words from indigenous Caribbean languages particular to the island of Hispaniola . Schools are based on a Spanish educational model; English and French are mandatory foreign languages in both private and public schools, although the quality of foreign languages teaching is poor . Some private educational institutes provide teaching on other languages, notably Italian, Japanese, and Mandarin . </P> <P> Haitian Creole is the largest minority language in the Dominican Republic and is spoken by Haitian immigrants and their descendants . There is a community of a few thousand people whose ancestors spoke Samaná English in the Samaná Peninsula . They are the descendants of formerly enslaved African Americans who arrived in the nineteenth century, but only a few elders speak the language today . Tourism, American pop culture, the influence of Dominican Americans, and the country's economic ties with the United States motivate other Dominicans to learn English . The Dominican Republic is ranked 2 in Latin America and 23 in the World on English proficiency . </P>

What is the language in the dominican republic