Well, yeah, you’re from Florida.
That’s what RGVChicano was referring to. I covered it in my first post in this thread, for those keeping score.
More info. Actually, while looking that up I was surprised to find that voseo is pretty common in Central America, apparently, and that most Latin American countries have at least some voseo speakers.
Yeah but see, it’s not uncommon to use a derogatory term as a term of endearment (so long as both parts understand it to be one) or viceversa, a term of endearment as an insult.
This doesn’t happen just in Spanish… witness Southern “bless 'er heart”, or singers calling their audience motherfuckers and the audience loving it.
I’m always amazed and amused by how many foreigners (movie companies among others) think that there is an “American Spanish” and a “Spanish from Spain.” The accent of Fuerteventura is very similar to Rioplatense (but in the Canary Islands they don’t use vos as the “you” form); the accent of the Valle del Ebro can be heard in many locations throughout Latin America (mostly in high areas, although things like using -ico for the diminutive exist also in for example the Dominican Republic); the majority of Latin American accents are most closely related to Andalusian and Extremeño accents. It’s got a lot more to do with historic reasons of “which area was populated by Spaniards-and-others from where” than with having a puddle in between.
Vosotros and ustedes are inverted in several locations. In Spain, “tú/vosotros” is the informal and most common form; in Costa Rica for example it’s the other way round. How this came to happen, I have no idea.
Oh, and Spanish does not have “a” centralized language academy… they’re over 20 (Royal) AcademiES of the Spanish Language 
The Royal is optional, they can all use it if they want.
One per country, including the USA.
This might, as fetus mentioned, have to do with you being from Florida. I’m from Michigan, grew up in a non-diverse small town, and I never actually met a genuine native Spanish-speaker up until college (6 years into studying Spanish.) So with me, you’ve got someone who learned a very ‘‘standardized’’ version of the language, generally accepted to be Castellano.
Additionally, the vast majority of the Spanish-speaking immigrants here are Mexican. The only Spanish speaking country I’ve been to for any significant length of time, thus far, is Mexico. Generally speaking, I was able to understand the people in Guadalajara better than the farm folks… my host father and I talked about everything from politics to social injustice to NAFTA. But then, there was a housekeeper in Guad who would say things as simple as ‘‘How are you?’’ and leave me completely baffled.
Barcelona, Spain was easy–I understood practically every word coming out of their mouths there, but this could very well be because Catalan is the preferred language, and maybe Spanish is like a second language to Barcelonans? Nava would know. That was my theory at the time, knowing how strongly regionalist Barcelona tends to be. And while I was IN Europe, I did meet a Puerto Rican couple who I understood perfectly. 
And believe me, there are some very slow dialects of Spanish that completely baffle me. I keep getting these calls with a particular accent – dunno where the clients are from, but I’m guessing rural Central America. It sounds like they’re only pronouncing half of every word, and each word with really heavy emphasis. I don’t even know what Ecuadorians sound like, I’m just going by what I was told as a ‘‘selling point’’ for internship there.
My first Spanish professor, however, was Puerto Rican, and I remember on the first day of class I understood approximately 20% of what she was saying. I cried. I honestly never heard a tougher accent to figure out, and I think it’s cool that it’s not a challenge for you because you’re living in Florida.
My wife is going to laugh her ass off when I show her this thread.
Yes, there are a number of different dialects of Spanish. The Colombians will tell you they speak the most proper Spanish, although an Argentinian will agree with you. When local Mexicans hear my wife’s Spanish (the Colombian dialect her mother taught her), they give the same reaction you might expect stereotypical midwestern farmhand from 50 years ago to give a stereotypical Harvard professor from 50 years ago. Most of South America is of the opinion that Mexican Spanish, with a number of unusual vocabulary words and odd grammatical constructions, is some degenerate version, while the Cubans have so many of their own words for things is almost a separate language, and is even called “Cuban”.
In the 1983 film “El Norte”, the young Mayan peasant would-be border-crosser is told by a friend that his Indian looks will get him sent all the way back home to Guatemala, unless he plays it smart: Tell any border agents he’s from the Oaxaca region of Mexico (an area with a high mexican-indian population) and talk like a Mexican, so he only gets sent back across the border. How to sound like a Mexican? Liberally pepper your language with profanity.
Exactly. A language is just a dialect with a military to back it up. If Canton province (Guangdong) were its own country, we’d call Cantonese a language. Still, even that maxim falls down in modern times. Catalan is referred to as a language, but it is closer to Castilian than Cantonese is to Mandarin.
If Western Europe were one country, like China is, then we’d be talking about the Portuguese and Spanish dialects, the Norwegian, Swedish and Danish dialects, and possibly even the Dutch and German dialects.
What people are talking about in this thread is generally referred to as an accent, not a dialect.
That’s what I thought early on, but fetus’ link (thanks by the way) seems to indicate that there are hundreds and hundreds of dialects, even within my fair USA. My heretofore classic understanding wouldn’t even have separated standard Queen’s English with standard American English as two dialects, but in fact it looks like the wankers across the river in Ontario speak a different dialect, linguistically speaking. I wonder if that means I can claim to speak multiple languages (I can speak Ontario-ian pretty well).
That’s curious, and I’ve never ever heard that before. For example, in Mexico, everyone knows “vosotros” but it’s only really used in the Bible there; no one else would ever use it. Hence, ustedes fulfills both roles in the sense that there’s really only one role: second person plural. I have to question how in the second person plural, though, vosotros and ustedes would have come to be reversed, in that the impolite tú and polite usted forms are still used, the seemingly natural inclination would be to preserve ustedes as the polite plural. Or are we confusing “formal/informal usage” (i.e., “formal use of the language”) with polite and impolite forms of address?
For what is worth this is sometimes true for Cuban listeners too, this is why the most used word in Havana is “¿Qué?”
I understand. Nevertheless, the general understanding is that “maricon” is used as a derogatory word for “homosexual.” For example. The usage of “fag” in the US has also similar correlations. In certain circles is source of sexual identification pride, but it is generally understood in the “mainstream” as a form of insult. Nevertheless, from doing some googling, supposedly is used by Chilean teenage girls as a form of endearment. So who knows.
That link uses a very strict definition of dialect-- ie, that there can be no vocabulary differences, just pronunciation. So, if a group of people have 10 words that only they use, then that’s a dialect? Not by most definitions of that term. If you look a the list of “dialects”, they are laughable. Boston English and Vermont English are different dialects? And note that some of them are actually called accents.
So it depends on what your definition of a dialect is, but I don’t think it’s meaningful to call Boston English, New York English, and Vermont English different dialects. Now, if you want to call BBC English and Scots English (or just Scots) different dialects, OK. They are quite distinct and if you speak only one, you’ll have trouble understanding the other. The first part of that link, btw, has a good discussion on the language/dialect issue.
Well. There is no international governmental entity that is going to force anyone to speak Spanish in a particular way. But . The Spanish Language does have two key institutions that have, to a certain extent, worked to create a standardization of the language: La Real Academia Española & La Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. La Real Academia Española founded in 1713 produces the Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española which is considered authoritative by many Spanish speakers. La Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española is made up of 22 academies (21 national academies plus RAE), produces it own dictionary, and does set trends on the language.
From wiki:
My main point was that unlike English [which as far as I know has no academy (ies)], Spanish does have two main bodies that set a particular standard.
In a similar vein, I hear that it’s slowly becoming popular for Mexican border-crossers to affect a Cuban accent and invent a dramatic story about their escape from the island, so they can get into the US scott free.
How do you figure?
Not to rain on your linguistic parade here, but “formal” and “informal” are the generally accepted technical terms for what you call “polite” and “impolite”.
That’s the definition of dialect that’s accepted by consensus in the world of linguistics. One particularly enlightening book that covers this and other related topics is “Do You Speak American?” by Robert MacNeil and William Cran. There was a PBS documentary that went along with it, by the same name, though I haven’t seen it.
Scottish English and Scots are two entirely different things. Scottish English is a dialect of English, while Scots is its own language. Scottish English is actually a fair bit like North American English, while Scots is more like English from Mars. If you really think Scots is a dialect of English, I challenge you to try and read the Scots translation of the New Testament without your head exploding.
I’d like to see a cite that most linguist consider New Yorkers and Bostonians to speak different dialects of English. If that’s the case, then everyone in the world speaks a unique dialect.
OK my bad on mixing those two, but there is no general agreement as to whether Scots is a language or a dialect. And I can read most of these Scots Proverbs without my head exploding. If I heard them spoken, I might have more trouble, but getting used to an accent is not that hard. As for the New Testament, I don’t know, but I can read The Lord’s Prayer just fine. I suspect most English speakers can as well:
I have lived in the Texas-Mexico border area for almost 38 years. I have worked with the farmworker and immigrant community for almmost 13 years. In all that time, I have never heard of such thing being as a trend among undocumented immigrants. It really doesn’t take that much to prove someone is not is a Cuban. Yes, there are OTM’s (Other Than Mexican) that come through this border, but few Cubans do and most take the route of Cuba to Fl.
Like I said upthread, there isn’t even agreement as to whether “language or dialect” is a meaningful question. And Scots is now officially recognized by the various governments of the UK as its own language, FWIW. Historically, the concept of Scots as a dialect of English has been used to oppress the Scottish people (“they speak lazy/bad/inferior/incorrect English and it must be corrected”), something which I for one would like to distance myself from as much as possible.
It’s mostly intelligible, but I suspect most of us are filling in some blanks based on our own native-language understanding of the Lord’s Prayer. Try this on for size:
YMMV. (I did say “slowly”, though.)
A few thoughts, late as usual: re RV Chicano´s comment that not many Cubans are crossing the border from Mexico, here are a few cites that say otherwise:
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2007/10/welcome-mat-for.htmlhttp://www.fresnobee.com/columnists/salinas/story/111749.html
http://www.restonweb.com/forum/viewtopic.php?
The third cite says 'In fiscal year 2005, 8,994 Cuban migrants arrived in the United States – but the majority, 7,267, came in through the Mexican border. In fiscal year 2006, arrivals reached 10,329, with 8,639 showing up at the border. ’
There are lots of regional accents just in Mexico; Oaxacans say that people from the north ‘sing’ when they talk; Puerto Ricans and Cubans ‘talk like they have a moutfull of pebbles’. Ecuadorian Spanish is formal and considered a little prissy- when I moved from Ecuador to Mexico I had picked up a strong Ecuadorian accent and people seemed to think my speech was rather amusing (actually, Ecuadorians think they don´t have an accent but everybody else does) and a lot of Nahua (‘Aztec’) words have made their way into Mexican Spanish but aren´t used by any other Spansh speakers.
But that’s an idiolect, not a dialect.
Yes, I’m quite familiar with how political entities use language recognition to suppress minorities. But it works the other way around, too. (Why do I find myself saying all this in my mind with a Scottish accent? ) Serbian and Croatian are considered different languages by their respective political bodies, but it makes no sense linguistically to call them so.
No head explosion there either. I couldn’t make out every word, but I understand what’s going on. Still, I’m familiar with the NT, so there’s not passage you’re gong to quote that I haven’t read before. Better to look at those proverbs I linked to. I can understand most of them without any problem, and quite a few more with a little effort.
At any rate, there isn’t a factual answer to “is this a language or a dialect”, so I will drop this for now, and take it up again if this thread ends up in GD.
From the article:
I still doubt it. Cuban accent is very distinct from Mexican & it does take a bit of work to keep up the accent and speed that Cubans use for Spanish. I really would like to see more facts from the report reg. that particular part of the story.
The links don’t work. I’ll have to look at the numbers. BTW, I am not saying Cuban don’t arrive via the Texas-Mexico border. They do, but that primary route has been FL -Cuba. Also, I am still very doubtful about Mexicans copping Cuban accent to enter the US illegally. Aside from the issue of being to maintain a Cuban accent that is very distinct from the Mexican, any border patrol worth his/her salt could ask questions that only a real Cuban could answer.
Reg. norteño accent, southerners usually say we “shout.”
You said, “If that’s the case, then everyone in the world speaks a unique dialect.” Which is essentially true; the only difference between an idiolect and a dialect is the number of people who speak it. Each dialect–including, yes, all the ones in the list I linked to (maybe not Utah)–is a collection of idiolects that are more similar to each other than to the next dialect over. Sure, most people call those differences “accents” instead of “dialects”, but the differences are more than phonemic; a speaker of Chicano English and a speaker of New York English are both speaking North American forms of English, sure, but their pronunciation as well as their diction, intonation pattern, lexicon, syntax, and even semantics (to some extent) vary. ETA: Forgot morphology. That’s important too.
One of the most curious things I’ve found in my study of linguistics is that, because everyone speaks at least one language, laypeople feel just as qualified as linguists to determine the validity of the basic tenets of the field. Can you imagine anyone saying any of the following things?
“Screw those silly chemists; I think mixing ammonia and bleach is a great idea!”
“What do biologists know? All that chromosome stuff is hogwash–it makes more sense to me that each individual sperm and egg has a picture of a child in it, and the kid they make is a mixture of the two.”
“Pavlov was full of crap. That dog just salivated because he was hungry.”
In any of those cases, a chemist, biologist or psychologist, respectively, could make quick work of any of those assertions with a bevy of cites, statistics and charts. But I’m no linguist; what I am is an undergraduate linguistics major, which I’ve only been for a semester and a half now; I’ve only taken one linguistics class, because my school doesn’t offer any more than that, and I’ve been making an effort to stay abreast with new developments in the field before I transfer to compensate somewhat. But I don’t have the qualifications to defend the basic tenets of linguistics; I just know that they are what they are, and that it’s frustrating as hell to see people who don’t specialize in linguistics dismiss them offhand. My furtive cries for actual linguists on the SDMB to come to my aid have been unilaterally ignored in other threads, so if you really want to know the scientific definition of “dialect” and why it doesn’t jibe with your personal definition of it, I suggest you contact someone at your local linguistics department. I wish I could be of more help.
Your Scottish accent must be thick, because I have no idea what you’re talking about. Sorry.
Fair enough. I’m not familiar with the NT, so I was ready to scoop my eyes out with a rusty spoon halfway through the third paragraph.
That’s exactly what the article I linked to says.
And it’s not even a remote possibility that someone, somewhere in Mexico has researched the Cuban dialect and the questions Border Patrol agents tend to ask extensively, and may have offered such knowledge to one Mexican border crosser at some point?