The distinctive variety of the Spanish language spoken in the region is known as habla canaria (Canary speech) or the (dialecto) canario (Canarian dialect).

The Canarians, and their descendants, played a major role during the conquest, colonization, and eventual independence movements of various countries in Latin America.

Their ethnic and cultural presence is most palpable in the countries of Uruguay, Venezuela, Cuba and the Dominican Republic as well as the US territory of Puerto Rico.

Alonso Fernández de Lugo, conqueror of Tenerife and La Palma, oversaw extensive immigration to these islands during a short period from the late 1490s to the 1520s from mainland Europe, mostly Castile and Portugal.

Guanche genetic markers have also been found recently in Puerto Rico and, at low frequencies, in peninsular Spain after later emigration from the Canary Islands.

[15] Although the Berbers are the most probable ancestors of the Guanches, it is deduced that important human movements (e.g., the Islamic-Arabic conquest of the Berbers) have reshaped Northwest Africa after the migratory wave to the Canary Islands and the "results support, from a maternal perspective, the supposition that since the end of the 16th century, at least, two-thirds of the Canarian population had an indigenous substrate, as was previously inferred from historical and anthropological data".

In this study, Fregel et al. estimated that, based on Y-chromosome and mtDNA haplogroup frequencies, the relative female and male indigenous Guanche contributions to the present-day Canary Islands populations were respectively of 41.8% and 16.1%.

An autosomal study in 2011 found an average Northwest African influence of about 17% in Canary Islanders with a wide interindividual variation ranging from 0% to 96%.

[24] Another recent study by Guillen-Guio et al. 2018 sequenced the entire genomes of a sample of 400 adult men and women from all the islands except La Graciosa to determine the relationship of Canarian genetic diversity to the more frequent complex pathologies in the archipelago.

The study indicated that Canarian DNA shows distinctive genetic markers, the result of a combination of factors such as the geographic isolation of the islands, the adaption to the environment of its inhabitants and the historic admixture of the Pre-Hispanic population of the archipelago (coming from North Africa), with European and from Sub-Saharan area individuals.

[26] According to the authors "the proportion of SSA ancestry we observed in Canary Islanders likely originated in the postconquest importation of enslaved African people.".

[25] Source: Genomic Ancestry Proportions (from ADMIXTURE, K-4) in Canary Islanders (Guillen-Guio et al. 2018)[25] The Guanches are related to the indigenous Berbers.

The inhabitants of La Gomera also retain an ancient way of communicating across deep ravines by means of a whistled speech called Silbo Gomero, which can be heard up to 3 km (2 miles) away.

The language was also formerly spoken on El Hierro, Tenerife and Gran Canaria[29][28] The holidays celebrated in the Canary Islands are of international, national and regional or insular character.

The anniversary of the first session of the Parliament of the Canary Islands, based in the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, held on 30 May 1983, is commemorated with this day.

To a lesser extent, they also went to the US states of Louisiana (mostly the southern portion) and Texas (mostly in and around San Antonio), and some areas in eastern Mexico including Nuevo León and Veracruz.

The Canarian population includes long-tenured and new waves of mainland Spanish immigrants, old settlers of Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, British, and French origin, as well as recent foreign-born arrivals.