Spanish dialects and varieties

There are a series of significant differences in the way the Spanish language is spoken in the 20 or so countries and territories where it is an official language.

Pronunciation

The letters s, c (before e and i), z and x

Within Spain one can roughly distinguish between the standard Castilian and the Andalusian dialects of Castilian Spanish. The first Spaniards to settle in the Americas, mostly Andalusians, brought some of their regionalisms with them. Today distinct accents are found in the different nations of the Americas. Typical of Latin America is seseo. The modern European Castilian phoneme IPA as in ciento ("hundred"), caza ("hunt") (interdental voiceless fricative, like English th in thin) does not exist in American Spanish (except in the Andean portions of the central Colombian departments of Antioquia, Caldas and Santander de ColombiaFrom [http://www.medtrad.org/panacea/IndiceGeneral/n6_G_Haensch.pdf this .PDF, section 4.2.1.1); instead the phoneme has merged with and these example words are, in American Spanish, homophones of siento ("I feel"), and casa ("house").

Since some words would become homonyms in Latin America with the confusion of the pronunciation of z or c before e or i and that of s, it is preferred to use instead synonyms or slightly different words. E.g., caza ("hunting") and casa ("house") become homonyms, as do cocer ("to boil") and coser ("to sew"). So, in Latin America they use instead mostly cacería ("hunting expedition") and cocinar (which means "to cook" in other dialects).

The most distinctive feature of the Spanish variants is the pronunciation of s. In Northern and Central Spain, and in Antioquia, Colombia, it is apico-alveolar; in Southern Spain and most of Latin America it is lamino-alveolar or dental. In most of Latin America (except Mexico, Andean Guatemala, Costa Rica, Andean Venezuela, Quito and most of highland Ecuador, and highland Bolivia), Parts of Colombia, mainly only Bogotá because the rest of the country does pronounce the s as an aspiration, syllable-final s is pronounced as an aspiration (a voiceless glottal fricative, ), or even not pronounced at all in some variants in rapid speech. For instance, Todos los cisnes son blancos ("All the swans are white"), can be pronounced as , or even . In parts of Andalusia, the distinction between syllables with a now-silent s and those originally without s is preserved by pronouncing the syllables ending in s with open vowels (that is, the open/closed syllable contrast has been turned into a lax/tense vowel contrast).

The pronunciation of the letter x in casual speech in Spain lenites and can drop the initial k component ending up just like their apico-alveolar s (). In Latin America it is pronounced as ks, with a regular lamino-alveolar or dental s, but when an s sound (spelled s or c) follows, it is assimilated resulting in kss > ks. This merging of two adjacent s sounds also occurs in the cluster spelled sc, that in Latin America is pronounced merely s; while in Spain this cluster doesn't merge because for them there aren't two adjacent s, but the apico-alveolar followed by the interdental . For example, excelente is pronounced in Northern and Central Spain as , but as by the rest. "Ascensión" is pronounced in Spain as , while in Latin America is pronounced just .

Since Ladino speakers were expelled from Spain in the 15th century, they have preserved the old sibilants.

The y and the ll

Traditionally Spanish had a phoneme , a palatal lateral, written ll. This was lost in most of the Americas (with the exception of bilingual areas where Quechua and other indigenous languages that have this sound in their inventories are spoken), but now it is also being lost in Spain (also with the exception of bilingual areas of Catalan and other languages that have preserved this sound in their inventories). It has been preserved in Ladino however, as well as in Tagalog (Filipino) words of Spanish origin such as kordilyera (Tagalog ). In many Spanish-speaking regions, the palatal lateral has merged with the palatal approximant (usually written y), and this merged phoneme is pronounced in a variety of ways. This phenomenon is called yeísmo. In most of the area where yeísmo is present, the phoneme is pronounced just as , or even . In the area around the Río de la Plata (Argentina, Uruguay) this phoneme is pronounced as a postalveolar fricative, voiceless or weakly voiced (similar to or ).

Sets of variants

In a broad sense, the Latin American Spanish could be grouped in six sets of variants, according to the pronunciation. The first group, the Caribbean is spoken in Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Panamá, the Colombian Caribbean, and the Caribbean parts of Venezuela and Mexico. The second one is the South American Pacific, which comprises Perú, Chile and Guayaquil, Ecuador. The third is the Central American (just Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador). The fourth is the Argentinian-Uruguayan-Paraguayan, which probably includes the Santa Cruz de Bolivia variant. The fifth, which probably is not a group, but a cluster of places that resisted changes in the pronunciation of the s sound in the end of a syllable, has been called the Highland Latin American Spanish, and is spoken in México, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Andean Colombia, Andean Venezuela, Quito, and Bolivia (except in Santa Cruz). The sixth is the set of Ladino speakers, with speakers scattered mainly in Europe, Turkey, Israel and the Americas.

Spanish sound library

Grammatical differences

Second person singular

Most Spanish dialects have two second person singular pronouns, one for informal use and one for more formal treatment. In most dialects the informal pronoun is tú, which comes directly from the Latin, and the formal pronoun is usted, which is usually considered to originate from "vuestra merced", meaning "Your (singular) grace" (though others have traced it to the Arabic Ustad, professor/sir). In a number of regions tú is replaced by another pronoun, vos, and the verb conjugation changes accordingly (see details below). "Vos" comes from Latin vos, which was simply the second person plural informal pronoun.

In any case, there is wide variation as when each pronoun (formal or informal) is to be used. In Spain, tú is informal (for example, used with friends) and usted is formal (for example, used with older people). In several countries, however, the formal usted is also used to denote a closer personal relationship. Some Chileans, for instance, not only employ usted to address from child to parent, but also from parent to child. Some countries like Cuba privilege the use of tú even in very formal circumstances and usted thus remains seldom used. Meanwhile, in other countries, the formal vs. informal use of second-person pronouns are used to denote authority. In Peru, for example, senior military officers will use tú to speak to their subordinates, while junior officers will only use usted to address their superior officers.

Using tú informally, especially in contexts where usted was to be expected, is called tuteo. The corresponding verb is tutear (a transitive verb, the direct object being the person addressed with the pronoun). Tutear is used even in those dialects where the informal pronoun is vos.

The use of vos instead of tú is called voseo. Voseo is informal in most countries. In Argentina and Uruguay it is the standard form of the informal second person singular, and is used by all to address others in all kinds of contexts, often regardless of social status or age, including by cultivated speakers and writers, in television, publicity, and even in translations from other languages. In Uruguay vos and tú are used concurrently, though vos is much more commonplace. In both cases the verb is conjugated as vos ("Vos querés / Tú querés", rather than "Vos querés / Tú quieres").

The name Rioplatense is applied to the particular dialect, spoken around the mouth of the River Plate (Río de la Plata) and the lower course of the Paraná River, where vos is always used, with verb conjugations that resemble those of the Castilian second person plural. This area comprises the most populated part of Argentina (the provinces of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe) as well as an important part of Uruguay including Montevideo, the capital.

In Ecuador, Vos is also the most prominent form throughout the country, though it does coexist with usted and the lesser used tú. Vos is regarded as the unofficial standard, but it is not used in public discourse, the media or television. To make things more complex, in Ecuador the choice of pronoun to be used depends on the participants' likeness in age and/or social status. Based on these factors, the addresser can assess himself as being an equal, superior or inferior to the addressee, and the appropriate choice of pronoun to be employed can then be made. Ecuadorians generally use vos among familiarized equals, or by superiors both social status and age to inferiors; tú among unfamiliarized equals, or by a superior in age but inferior in social status; and usted by both familiarized and unfamiliarized inferiors, or by a superior in social status but inferior in age.

Vos can be heard throughout most Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, and a small part of Peru as well, but in these places it is reproached as sub-standard and the speech of the uneducated and ignorant. It is also used as the unofficial standard in the Department of Antioquia (Colombia), in Maracaibo (Venezuela), in Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and the State of Chiapas in Mexico.

In Chile, tú is the preferred pronoun in all normal and educated speech. Vos is used, pronounced with an aspiration at the end instead of s. When so pronounced, it is always derisive to some extent, with the magnitude of this disdain depending on the inflection of speech. In this form, it is used in informal speech between very close friends as playful banter (usually among men), but even then a change in inflection can change the meaning of a statement, which can result in an offensive comment.

A usage similar to voseo is vos with the verb in the grammatically plural form (as if it used vosotros). It appears as a formal or disrespectfully familiar use in the works of the Spanish Golden Century and period works placed in that era. In Colombia, the choice of second person singular varies with location. In most of inland Colombia (chiefly the Andean region), usted is the pronoun of choice for all situations, even in speaking between friends or family, but in large cities (Bogotá mainly), the use of tú is becoming more accepted in informal situations, especially between young interlocutors of the opposite sex and among young women. In Valle del Cauca (Cali) Antioquia (Medellín) and the Pacific coast, the pronouns used are vos/usted. In the Caribbean coast (mainly Barranquilla and Cartagena), tú is used for practically all informal situations and many formal situations, usted being reserved for the most formal environments. A peculiarity occurs in Boyacá and among older speakers in Bogotá: usted is replaced by sumercé for formal situations (it is relatively easy to spot a Boyacense by his/her use of this pronoun). Sumercé comes from su merced ("your mercy").

In parts of Spain, fifty years ago a child would not use tú but usted to address a parent. This would be very unusual today. Among the factors for the ongoing substitution, there are the new social relevance of youth and reduction of social differences. Being addressed as usted makes one feel older. It has also been attributed to the egalitarianism of the right-wing party Falange. On the contrary, Spanish leftists of the early 20th century would address their comrades as usted as a show of respect and worker's dignity.

Joan Corominas explains that vos was a peasant form in classical Castilian, and since most Spanish immigrants to the New World belonged to this class, vos became the unmarked form.

Another explanation is that in Spain, although vos denoted high social status by those who were addressed as such (monarchs, nobility, etc.) these people never actually used the pronoun themselves since there were not any people above them in society. Those who used vos were the inferiors (lower classes and peasants). When the waves of Spanish immigrants arrived to populate the New World, they were primarily comprised of these lower classes and peasants. These would then want to raise their social status from what it was in Spain and would demand to be addressed as a vos. Everyone thus became a vos in the Americas, and the pronoun was transformed into not only indicator of low status for the addresser, but also for the addressee. Conversely, in Spain today "vos" is still considered a highly exalted archaism that is confined to liturgy, and its use by native Spaniards is seen as deliberate archaism.

Speakers of Ladino still use vos as it was originally used, to address people higher in the social ladder. The pronoun usted was not introduced to this dialect of Spanish when the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, hence the reason why vos is still used much like usted is used in modern Spanish.

Other less frequent forms analogous to usted are voacé, bosanzé and boxanxé (by Moriscos), vuecencia, v/usía. The latter are short for vuestra excelencia and vuestra señoria. The most common analogous form of usted, still used today is vusted which can be heard in Andean regions of South America.

Second person plural

In Standard European Spanish the plural of tú is vosotros and the plural of usted is ustedes. In Latin America vosotros is not used, and the plural of both tú and usted is ustedes. This means that speaking to a group of friends a Spaniard will use vosotros and a Latin American will use ustedes. The verb conjugation for ustedes employs a grammatically third person plural form (even though ustedes is semantically second person).

In Argentina and Chile, schoolchildren are taught the conjugation of vosotros and are not taught to use usted at all. Though, it is only a formality, as nobody ever uses vosotros in real-life situations.

The only vestige of vosotros in America is boso/bosonan in Papiamento. Joan Corominas supposes that the vos forms in the Caribbean were perceived as slave-talk, and disrespectful for, initially, whites and later for everybody.

The plural of the Colombian sumercé is sumercés/susmercedes, from Sus Mercedes ("Your Mercies").

In some parts of Andalusia, the usage is what is called ustedes-vosotros: ustedes is combined with the verbal forms for vosotros.

In Ladino vosotros is still the only second plural pronoun since usted does not exist.

Conjugation of the second person

Changes in the pronoun also bring along a change in the second person of the verb. Speakers who use vos also replaced the corresponding verb forms by others related with the plural form used with vosotros, either without the diphthongization of those forms or without the final s. When irregular verbs are observed it is obvious that vos conjugations are related to the vosotros forms. Some examples follow (note that in Ladino -áis is pronounced , and the medial s in vosotros is voiced to ).

"You speak"

Iberian Castilian singular - tú hablas

Argentina and Central America - vos hablás

Uruguay - vos hablás, tú hablás

Chile - tú hablas, tú hablái, vos hablái

Colombia - usted habla, tú hablas, sumercé habla, vos hablás

Venezuela (Maracaibo) and archaic Spanish formal singular - vos habláis

Ecuador - vos hablas, vos hablás, vos habláis

Ladino formal singular - vos favláis

Iberian Castilian plural - vosotros habláis

Andalusian Spanish plural - vosotros/ustedes habláis

Canarian Spanish plural - ustedes hablan

Latin American Spanish plural - ustedes hablan

Ladino formal and informal plural - vosotros favláis pronounced vozotros favlash

"That you lose" (subjunctive) - Note that perder is a semi-regular verb, with vowel alternation according to stress position.

Iberian Castilian singular - que tú pierdas

Central America and Argentina - que vos perdás

Ecuador - que vos pierdas

Uruguay - que vos pierdas, que tú pierdas

Chile - que tú perdái, que vos perdái

Colombia - que usted pierda, que tú pierdas, que sumercé pierda, que vos perdás

Venezuela(Maracaibo) and archaic Spanish formal singular: que vos perdáis

Ladino formal singular - que vos perdáis pronounced perdásh

Iberian Castilian plural - que vosotros perdáis

Andalusian Spanish plural - que vosotros/ustedes perdáis

Latin American Spanish plural - que ustedes pierdan

Ladino formal and informa plural - que vosotros perdáis pronounced ke vozotros perdásh

"Come" (imperative mood)

Iberian Castilian singular- ven tú

Argentina, Central America, Uruguay, Venezuela (Maracaibo) - vení vos

Ecuador - vení vos, ven vos

Ladino formal singular - vení/d vos

Chile - ven tú, ven vos

Colombia - venga usted, ven tú, venga sumercé, vení vos

Spain Spanish plural - venid vosotros

Andalusian Spanish plural - venid ustedes

Latin American Spanish plural - vengan ustedes/vustedes or vengan susmercedes

Ladino formal and informal plural - vení/d vosotros

The term voseo also applies when a pronoun other than vos is used but the verb immediately following is nonetheless conjugated according to the norms of vos: hence "tú subís, tú decís, tú querés" is still considered voseo.

Verb tenses

Spanish has two ways to express an action finished in the past: the simple past called pretérito indefinido, and the compound tense called pasado perfecto. In Spain and many other places, the compound tense is preferred in most cases:

Yo he viajado a los Estados Unidos. "I have traveled to the USA."
Cuando he llegado, la he visto. "When I have arrived, I have seen her."

However, in other places the simple past tense is preferred:

Viajé a Estados Unidos. "I traveled to the USA."
Cuando llegué, la vi. "When I arrived, I saw her."

In Argentina and Uruguay (Rioplatense Spanish), the compound past tense is used rarely, most notably when the action has been finished recently, to stress its immediacy, much like the present perfect in English, but even in those cases the simple past tense is prevalent.

¿Dónde estuviste? "Where were you?"

In this dialect, the first example of the compound past given above (Yo he viajado...) is grammatical, though it sounds affected or foreign. The second example (Cuando he llegado), however, would be considered grammatically incorrect due to the presence of the compound tense in the clause started by cuando ("when").

Evolution

The Swedish Hispanist Bertil Malmberg holds that there is a tendency in the evolution of Spanish to prefer syllables that end in vowels. In variants like that of Argentine gauchos, which were less subject to the standard, this leads to a weakening of final consonants like , or . The realization of syllable-final as a barely audible or simply nothing is rather noticeable in many dialects, including the Argentine ones. In the Castilian variety, this tendency exists but is less marked.

However, Malmberg and others have pointed out that in Mexican Spanish, it is vowels that lose strength, while consonants are fully pronounced. Malmberg explains this by the influence of the consonant-complex Nahuatl language through bilingual speakers and place names. Others have pointed out that Mexican Spanish is tending towards stress timing and concomitant vowel reduction, and that this is likely to be caused by the influence of geographically close English of the United States and strong economic and social-cultural ties between the two countries.

Mutual comprehension

The different dialects and accents do not severely block cross-understanding among the educated. The basilects have diverged more. As an example, early sound films were dubbed into one version for the entire Spanish-speaking market. (Disney Pictures used educated Puerto Rican speakers). Currently, non-Spanish (usually Hollywood) productions are dubbed separately into each of the major accents, but productions from another Spanish-language country are never dubbed. The popularity of telenovelas and Latin American music familiarize the speakers with other varieties of Spanish.

Prescription and a common cultural and literary tradition, among other factors, have contributed to the formation of a loosely-defined register which can be termed Standard Spanish (or "Neutral Spanish"), which is the preferred form in formal settings, and is considered indispensable in academic and literary writing, the media, etc. This standard tends to disregard local grammatical, phonetic and lexical peculiarities, and draws certain extra features from the commonly acknowledged canon, preserving (for example) certain verb tenses considered "bookish" or archaic in most other dialects.

Selected list of Spanish dialects and varieties

External links

References

Bertil Malmberg, Det spanska Amerika i sprakets spegel, Stockholm, 1966

Spanish language | Spanish variants

Ceceo | Ceceo

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Spanish dialects and varieties