I heard a story on NPR the other night about the increasing number of Spanish language television and radio channels in the US. The reporter talked about how networks and companies are starting to market to a sort of monolithic Latino group, as opposed to marketing to Dominicans, Mexicans, Cubans, etc. They also mentioned that actors in Spanish language programming are being told to lose their regional accents, and adopt more of a standard Spanish accent. This sounded similar to General American English, found predominantly found in the Midwestern US, between about western New York to the plains states.
So I started to wonder where you would natively find the standard Spanish accent that Hispanic actors and, presumably, newscasters are starting to use on television and radio.
Mexico. Really. They do more dubbing for the Latin American market than any other country due to their clarity of speech and their standard dialect. For many shows, though, there’s separate dubbing for the European Spanish market.
As such, though, they do sometimes use non-Mexican words that may be regarded as more international. One that always bugs the heck out of me is the use of mani to mean peanuts, because I learned the Mexican version as cacahuates. There are other examples, but invariably the company is Mexican and most of the dubbers are Mexican. Gosh, I hear so much dubbed stuff these days that I can start to identify some of the dubber artists. The most distinctive is the guy that hosts Cheaters (my wife watches, not me!) – I always recognize his voice as that of Baldoqui on Uga Uga (dubbed from Brasilian Portuguese) because that was the first Spanish-language show that I’d ever watched while learning Spanish and my dog was ultimately named after the crazy girl Bionda.
Incidently, I don’t have any cites for the Mexico-is-the-biggest assertion. I remember reading it in a Mexican paper a few months ago because there was an article about how Fox changed dubbing houses for the Simpsons, and how union/non-union issues could result (and ultimately did) in all of the Simpsons’ voices changing for the current season (which just started down here). It had mentioned that for the Latin American TV and Movie market, Mexico was the place to get the job done.
Sorry but, cite? I am sorry but I must disagree with you, Mexicans have a very distinctive accent that is anything but standard.
I know this is GQ, but IMHO there is no such thing as a “standard” Spanish accent, maybe a neutral accent, which means that the speaker pretty much loses/hides his/her own accent.
I believe that the reason that a lot of TV is dubbed by Mexicans is because Mexico is a huge market, compared for example with Uruguay, and second because there is a huge Mexican community in the US. We don’t get a lot of TV dubbed by Mexicans around here… or maybe I can’t tell because they don’t have a Mexican accent.
I heard a joke once. A little Cuban boy was talking to his mother. “Mami, we’re going to learn about plurals in school tomorrow. What’s a plural?” “Oh, mijo, it’s easy. Just take a word and add an ‘S’: el coco, lo coco!”
Where in the Caribbean are you from, Mighty_Girl? A class I had last semester touched on Caribbean Spanish somewhat (though mostly U.S. varieties originating in the Caribbean - Dominican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, etc.)
There’s no such thing as a “neutral” accent or “no accent”. In the U.S., newscasters essentially use pronunciation typical of the upper midwest, though it’s a slightly formalized artificial form of it. If that sounds “neutral”, it’s only because people all over the U.S. have come to accept it as the norm for the mass media; we upper midwesterners have an accent just as much as anyone else - a southerner or a New Yorker would be able to detect it instantly.
I don’t know for certain, but I suspect that the “pan-Latino” accent in the media probably reflects the norms of “Highland Spanish.” In Latino Spanish, the most prestigious varieties are those of Mexico City, Bogotá, and Lima, which during colonial times were seats of Spanish viceroys. Thus the accent of those highland areas, particularly among wealthier, more-educated people, is much closer to the standard of Spain, and particularly of Madrid, than many areas in Latin America. Because of their shared heritage as seats of government, the cities’ accents come from those of the Spanish elites and all three cities have accents relatively close to each others’. Most Spanish settlers in Latin America came from the southern Spanish region of Andalucía, where the local accent still resembles Latin American Spanish. The Andaluces were largely poor and rural, and their accent was highly divergent from that of the Spanish elite even back in the 1500s, and they brought their accent to most of Latin America. So the difference between the Spanish spoken in Mexico City, Bogotá, and Lima and that spoken in the rest of Latin America stems from much older regional differences in Spain.
That’s not to say that folks from those three cities sound like Spaniards, exactly - speakers from those areas speak with the seseo, meaning they lack the “th” sound that Spaniards have in words spelled with “c” and “z”. They lack the second person familiar plural of Peninsular Spanish, and there’s no doubt substantial differences in word choice.
I don’t know anything about this particular media trend, though - this is just a guess on my part. Highland Spanish is the most prestigious kind in Latin America, so it seems likely that it would be chosen as a standard in the Spanish-language media.
Somewhere along the way I was taught that the reason that one of the Midwestern dialects became the broadcast standard was that that’s where the first broadcast schools were located. I don’t mind being corrected if I am mistaken.
As the linked article indicates, the belief that a Midwestern accent should be a “standard” has declined over the last forty years.
I guess I didn’t mean “standard” in the way you mean “standard” but as mentioned by other posters above, the way I mean “standard English,” i.e., something which doesn’t truly exist but really kind of does just by proxy. The “standard” Mexican accent I think was brilliantly illuminated by Excalibre, and I think him for that explanation. It really satisfies my curiosity as to why the Colombians and Peruvians on television have always been perfectly intelligible to me in addition to the Mexicans! They all share this idealized “standard” that isn’t standard!
Actually, there’s no such thing as a “standard” Mexican accent, either. In many, many, many parts of Mexico the accent is “non-standard” and difficult for me to understand. Sometimes it’s slurred. Sometimes it’s too subdued. Sometimes they sound like United States spanish. Sometimes I don’t know what the problem is – I just don’t understand a damn thing they say. These people don’t get jobs as actors or voice artists until they adapt the “standard” accent, just the same way you don’t normally become a national newscaster until you lose your Alabama accent.
Well, Mexico is relatively small compared to the entire Latin American market, especially when you include the United States. The majority of the United States Spanish, though, is not the “standard” Spanish that you get on television. It’s the lower class Spanish that poor immigrants have brought with them. Consider watching “El Corte del Pueblo” or some other show where “real” people are brought on. You’ll see who speaks “standard” Spanish versus non-standard right off.
I have a devil of a time understanding people from Oaxaca because it sounds “mumbly” to me. When I was in Querétaro last summer, I noticed the accent isn’t so sing-songy in the city compared to the country. Although, it seems to be a fashion of younger people there amongst themselves to do that (especially men!). The stereotypical sing-song accent of Mexico seems to come mostly from the rural folk.
This accent is used by upper middle class in the central region of Mexico. This doesn’t sound like the accent you hear in the US because most Mexicans who migrate to the US are peasants and uneducated, thus having a different accent.
Mexico City accent is also a bit more pronounced.
Most Latin american countries deny this because they like to think their accent is the best and most neutral, especially Colombians and in specific those from Bogota, and honestly are quite jealous of this.
Everytime I hear Telemundo news from broadcasters that have neutralized their native countries accents, it sounds almost like this central Mexico upper middle class I’m talking about.
Most people deny it because they’re either in denial, jealousy, or because they are erroneously thinking Mexican accent is this peasant accent heard in the US, or the Mexico City accent which is more pronounced, or other regionalisms and people thinking all mexicans use “wey” “orale!”“etc”.
Well, no, as has been said, the Mexican accent is not “standard.” This is not because other Latin American countries are “jealous,” but because the Mexican accent is quite distinctive and easily identified. If you want a standard accent, you need something more generic.
Here in Panama we’ve had to develop audio guides for tourism sites in Spanish that would be suitable for a wide range of Latin American visitors. One thing we definitely wanted to avoid was to have an identifiable Mexican accent in such a guide.
No offense meant to our Argentine posters, but Argentines are frequently stereotyped as being somewhat arrogant. The Argentine accent is also highly distinctive. So it’s not so much that the Argentine accent is regarded as being snooty in and of itself, it’s that it’s an accent associated with snooty people.
A Madrid accent could come across as snooty in Latin America, like a British accent in the US.
When I studied Spanish in US high school I was taught a Mexican accent. One of the obvious differences between it and some South American accents is the “ll” sound - in Mexico it is a “y” sound while in many other accents, including Argentine, it is a “zh” sound like in the French “je”. E.g. Mexican “Me-ya-moe <nombre>” vs. Argentine “Me-zha-moe <nombre>”.
Also, we were taught never to use “vosotros” or “vos”, and not to use a Castillian lithp.
Is there an East Coast/West Coast divide? The two big centers for the American entertainment industry are Los Angeles and New York. The largest hispanic group in Los Angeles is Mexican while the largest hispanic group in New York is Puerto Rican.
As you indicate yourself, there isn’t any real Standard English Accent. There are only national/regional standards. Received Pronunciation may be standard in Britain, and General American for the US and Canada. But neither is standard for the other’s region, nor for Australia/New Zealand. Since there are 19 Spanish-speaking countries, finding a standard that works for all of them is even more impossible.
Personally, as a non-native speaker, I find the Spanish spoken in highland regions of Peru and Ecuador the clearest and easiest to understand. It’s generally clearly enunciated and not too rapid. I don’t know how this is perceived by native Spanish speakers, however.
So if these Spanish speaker were English speakers, what type of accents would they be considered to have? Upper class. Working class? Would they be perceived the way say an American would perceive a British accent or vice versa?
King Filipe VI? His former newscaster Queen?
The Argentine Presidenta?
Lionel Messi?
Ricky. Martin?
George W Bush (:D)
As far as I know, how the Argentine accent is regarded isn’t due to any upper class/working class associations. If I had to compare it to an accent in English, either a New York or a Texan* accent might be the closest parallel. Not snooty in an upper class sense, but belonging to folks that, as our Argentine friend Frodo says, think they’re better anyone else.
*Again, no offense intended to New Yorkers (I’m one myself) or Texans. But both groups are stereotyped as being arrogant about their city or state.
