Although I understand that Spaniards do not hold this stereotype (and many are even confused by it), most Latins use the Galician accent to convey dumb (standing by for Polish as someone said upthread).
This is only second to their neighboring country of choice, of course. Every country has a neighboring country they don’t like and use as punching bag for ethnic jokes. Here is Puerto Rico they use Dominicans, for example.
The Cuban accent gets a lot of use of movie translations. It is not often associated with any particular mindset, though (not that I am aware of, at any rate). It is just a very identifiable accent that speakers from any country recognize as being “something else”. I have seen it use to double for Texan, surfer, Hispanic and many others in the English original.
It’s funny to read such a lot of kind of nonesenses. You say that in argentina people make jokes about the accent of Galicia, a spanish region, due to many galicians were living in argentina. Well, I’m sorry for what I will tell you now, but in Spain there are many jokes about the argentinians, your crooked behavior, and above all your accent, because for us is very funny, it’s hilarious… stereotypes my friend, don’t you think?
Spanish Accent, Castillian accent, it’s without any doubt the poshest accent, because even people from latin america find hard to hear someone reciting The Quixote with their own accent. Try to imagine a californian guy reciting Shekaspeare, don’t you think it could be more proper if someone from Exeter recite those verses?
Spanish language was born in Castilla, and for many people even nowdays it’s called Castillian, and it is logical that in that region you could find the poshest spanish accent all over the world. It is said that the most perfect spanish accent that you could ever hear, it’s the accent from Valladolid [a city from Castilla, Spain]. If you want to hear someone reaciting Góngora, Quevedo, Lope de Vega, Cervantes and many other classical spanish authors, the castillian accent it’s the one.
A wolverine is not a wolf cub. If you’re going to translate it (don’t), it would be better go with carcayú, from the term in French Canada. (Yes, I know that Logan is Anglo-Canadian. Still closer.)
“Similarly does Metropolitan French sound la-de-da to a Québecois?”
Crisse oui. Quebs are to the French as Australians to the English. Australians will say “Bloody pommies” and Quebs “maudits Français”. Parisian/standard French can sound rather snobbish/self-important/precious in the same way that received pronounciation British can.
French from other regions of France may either sound like an attenuated version of Parisian French or a bit strange/buffoony, like the Marseille accent.
French from the cités doesn’t sound snobbish, more like British Innits. Quebec newscasters tend to sound halfway French, unless they’re going for the common man shtick.
I went to Guatemala with a friend from Madrid once, and people did say things that suggested they thought her accent was posh, although no particular remark comes to mind right now… she had to repeat herself sometimes for people, too. IANA native Spanish speaker.
Iconic - So much so that Max Baer was never real able to act again, he was so strongly typecast. The backwoods accent and (fake) colloquialisms had a lot to do with it. Pa Clampett at least managed to shake his typecasting after a decade or so…
The thing with the hillbilly accent is that it portrayed an area of the USA that has remained a backwater when the rest of the country had progressed. Hence the stereotype. I suppose it’s debatable whether such icons as Gomer Pyle, the BEverly Hillbillies, and Andy Griffith were defining the “backwoods” image, or simply presenting and reinforcing it, or a little of both?
I guess the question is, do the attitudes various accents of Spain and latin America reflect similar isolation (or isolation from progress)? Is there any particular area that stands out across spanishdom(?), beyond its local area? Or is it strictly a “local prejudice against they guys across the hills” thing?
A more interesting comparison is British accents to North America. They don’t all sound posh. From years of exposure to British culture we (some of us) learn to distinguish the posh HRH/Oxford accent of the upper class from the various degrees of lower class defined by different regional accents - of course, precisely because British TV and movies use that accent as a shorthand for class too. (As Ronnie 1 or 2 would say “I’m from the third world - Yorkshire”). Precisely the same thing that the BEverly Hillbillies was doing with USA regional accents.
So, does Spanish media use accent as a shorthand for class, too? Is there a Spain “upper class” accent like the one all the aristos in Britain seem to pick up at Oxford or Cambridge?
The idea of British accents generally being posh amuses me after 40 years of Monty Python and various sitcoms produced by BBC and Granada TV. I mean, Onslow on Keeping Up Appearances, really? I can’t imagine that Spanish doesn’t have the same sort of examples.
The aristos don’t pick up their accents at Oxford and Cambridge. If anything, given that those places are considerably more varied in their student populations than they used to be, they would tend to lose their posh mannerisms of speech.
My experience has been that in Spain people use the term “Castillian Spanish” only to refer to the “dialect” spoken in certain parts of Spain with people mentioning the city of Valladolid as the place where the epitome of Castillian Spanish is spoken. A little like the RP pronunciation of southern England and BBC speak being the exported models of “perfect” English.
Again, when I was in New York City and spoke my Spanish (learnt and honed by living in Spain) to Hispanos from Central and South America, they would ooh and ah telling me that my Spanish was beautifully correct and that their own version of Spanish was bastardized.
Again, when I was in Paraguay, they called the Spanish that is spoken in Spain: “Castillian” and they called their own version as simply “Spanish”.
When living in SW Andalucia (Cadiz) yearsa ago, the “rubes” which were the subject of many jokes were from Lepe (Huelva).
I enjoyed the jokes, but couldn’t really figure out why, since Lepe was pretty much on the main roads east and west Malaga-Sevilla-Portugal Algarve; and north and south Huelva-Extremadura-Castilla. Presumably pretty worldly, at least in rural Spanish fashion.
“The bleeding eyes of baby Jesus on the cross”: yours? It’s is a new one on me, and I must say I like it. I don’t think I’ll actually use it aloud as an epithet, except as a quote, however, because I don’t quite know where it would be appropriate.
Your ellipses seems to indicate a euphemism. Palms? Something more vulgar or weird?
I hear this a lot also and it always annoys me. I usually use the occasion to speak for maintaining ethnic/linguistic pride. It’s like Americans who say that, well, after all, British speech is more beautiful [since] ours has been bastardized (well, OK Mr. historian, but give it a rest. Also if you ask why arrogate the term “Americans”).
Also (no pull quote from above), interestingly, although Polish is the chosen ethnic/national group for dumb jokes in writing, in speech when telling a “dumb Polish” joke the nationality is merely cited. No one here (except Russians, Czechs, or Silesians?) can do a Polish accent. Spoken “Dumb Rednecks” [backwoods Southerners]-jokes, a variation, is when some type of accent is attempted.
It would’ve taken me a while to figure this out, but I grew up watching (occasionally) the show and see it used as satire.
But I never knew a “Judy” meant a homosexual until it was explained to me about Judy Garland and one of her fan bases, supposedly. I have heard of similar fan-bases of Bette Midler, but I guess she lacks classical authority, although I think she actually did have a stint performing in exclusively gay hangouts, as opposed to Judy Garland (I think).
"who the bleeding … " The word missing in English would probably start with an “f”. Nava likes to translate the colorful Spanish idiomatic expressions.
Various regions have their own Spanish accents/dialects. For the various regions, there are different accents that can be characterized as “more hillbilly” and “more upper class”. But a “lower class/country” accent in Mexico won’t sound or be spoken the same way as a “low class” accent in Puerto Rico, and both will be different from a “low class” accent in Colombia.
The most “standard” and “neutral” accents that I’ve found in Latin America media or in translations are most similar to Colombian accent.
The reason I mentioned Castillian only sounds posh to me if it is spoken by a real Castillian is that the sounds and words use, while correct, normal, and appropriate in Castillian, are out of place in other regions/dialects. So someone of another region attempting to sound like that comes out seemingly devaluing their own dialect (which is sad and IMHO very wrong). Sort of trying to put down something that shouldn’t be put down, and an actual ignorance of the dialect and the framework/grammar/phonetical rules, etc.
This is a very funny situation, where I potentially misunderstood a rhetorical figure (Nava’s euphemism, not the long epithet) as part of the epithet itself–being American and not immediately recognizing “bleeding”–and was prepared to use it as such. I had an idea of St. Lucy conflated with Jesus.
Only, carcayú sounds like a joke,* glotón* (the other name of wolverines in Spanish, lit. “glutton”) sounds even more like a joke, and wolf cubs have their own mythos in Spanish of being small and fierce… gee, who does that sounds like?
It shouldn’t have been translated in the first place, but a literal translation isn’t always the best one.
Nope, as rural as it gets. Also, many of them are horrible at the kind of linguistic strategies which facilitate communication with people from other dialects (rephrasing, vocalization…). Being a bad communicator doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is stupid but it makes them appear so.
No missing words, it was “I’m looking for a way to phrase this”. And the expression was invented for the occasion, mixing up the baby Jesus crying (although nobody killed a kitten), St Lucy’s bleeding eyes (kudos to** Leo**), Christ on the Cross and a serious shortage of pogo sticks.
Nava: …“No missing words, it was “I’m looking for a way to phrase this”. And the expression was invented for the occasion, mixing up the baby Jesus crying (although nobody killed a kitten), St Lucy’s bleeding eyes (kudos to Leo), Christ on the Cross and a serious shortage of pogo sticks.”…
Hah! So I didn’tmisconstrue Nava’s epithet as a whole–she wasn’t speaking British here. I just misunderstood her coinage as being one in use previously by a large group of people.
(Or have I misconstrued Nava’s response to Karl?)
More examples of the vagaries of etymology, or of false critical analysis.
I Didn’t say that. I said that all Spaniards are referenced colloquially as “Gallegos”.
I know, I’ve even told a few of them here.
That is possibly correct, it still sounds funny to Argentinians, not so much as the “intrinsically funny” languages like Portuguese and Italian, but funny nonetheless.
