My husband’s family is from Mexico. In school in CA, for who knows what reason, they teach Castillian Spanish. I once pointed out to my teacher that this wasn’t Mexican Spanish, which would be much more useful, and was accused of being racist. OK then.
After 25 years of being with husband and his family, I have a very hard time in Barcelona, which I visit once a year for business. The accent is slightly different, but there is also a completely different regional language that gets mixed in, used on signs in restaurants, etc. I can order a meal or talk to a cabbie, but a I cannot carry on a conversation. Which I find extremely frustrating. Such is life.
I too wish there was a way to easily convey the vast differences between types of Spanish. Alas, when I bring it up here (US) I still often get the weird reaction when I try to give examples. Of course there’s only one Spanish! :rolleyes:
When I spent some time in Panama I was shocked how much Panamanians looked and sound like Dominicans. PR also have a very different accent, I even asked a couple of people if they were sure that they weren’t Dominican.
Spaniards used vosotros, not vos. Maybe Nava can correct me if I’m wrong. I attended Catholic school, back then most of the teachers were old Spanish nuns. I never heard a vos either. Same when I have been to Spain.
Thanks for the info about Colombians. I have met many, and some didn’t speak such good Spanish. Some spoke it beautifully.
Vos was singular, vosotros was plural, was the way I remember it being taught. I don’t remember when I was in primary school if they told us everyone who used them except, “not us” and some people in South America.
Thanks for the first paragraph. When I visited Panama the first time I was “I know there are Dominicans everywhere, but it is not possible that I’m meeting every single one of them here. Maybe they’re Panamanians? My mind is confused!” You’re the first Dominican I know who has commented on the similarity of their accent to Panamanians.
In terms of dictionary labels, I have a really old Larousse Spanish-English unabridged, which gets around the issue in the OP by not labeling European Spanish at all, but rather by just presenting it as the default. If something is of the “New World,”–or “aberrant”–it gets the label Amer., (for “Americanism”).
Newer references that I’ve used now often just say Spanish if something is limited to Europe, and Latin American (or more specifically, Mexico, or Southern Cone, etc.), for things limited to areas of the western hemisphere.
However, that is really only practicable as a label in a dictionary entry. It doesn’t seem feasible to me, when one is speaking or writing in English, to describe something as “Spanish Spanish,” being opposed to Latin American Spanish. As mentioned above, I think the most commonly accepted term is peninsular Spanish. Even though probably quite a few (English-speaking) Americans at least might not know what you mean, it confuses them less than when you say Castillian, I think.
Still, is there an accepted term that only distinguishes between Spanish in the Americas and otherwise? Like we have American English and International English? Sure, that covers a lot of varieties, but they’re just being grouped together.
Indeed. I think that type is dying out, though. I once had the unenviable challenge of trying to rid an evening adult EL program (in a very large CA district that will go unnamed) of one of its teachers who not only taught mostly in Spanish (good luck, Koreans), but wanted everyone to know she was doing it in “proper Castillian.” (She was an elderly Spaniard who taught Spanish to kids in the morning.) This challenge came up when it became apparent that she would have the darker skinned students (typically the indigenous Guatemalans) always sit in the back rows, while her preferred, lighter skinned students sat in front. I caught her once literally rehearsing her class beforehand, which she viewed as a performance for the students, who would “benefit” from her perfect diction. In fact, I think she’d been an actress in Mexico or Spain, and “teaching” these poor people was how she could keep an captive audience. But she didn’t know shit about language acquisition, and they weren’t learning anything. Unfortunately, many school districts at one time hired people like this (because the belief was that you had to know Spanish to teach English to Spanish speakers), but they’ve thankfully mostly retired now, as she did.
Newer Spanish dictionaries, at least the ones from the Academias, do include the countries that use the word, and list entries if they vary by country. A favorite example, fotuto. And not even countries, but if the meaning varies by general branch or by region (Americas) or area of Spain. An example of this is cuchara.
When no country is next to the entry, it is a general meaning that is accepted in most of the Spanish-speaking world.
I’ve watched Colombian soap operas, and with my Guanajuato, Mexico Spanish (which is distinct from other regions of Mexico, thankyouverymuch) they’ve always been very, very easy to understand. Even watching Mexican soap operas I could usually pick out the Colombians. (Spanish isn’t my native language.)
I had a vastly different experience in Barcelona. I was worried that everyone spoke Spain-movie-Spanish (Madrid accent, I guess) and I’d have a terrible time understanding them, or that they would insist on Catalan, but in the end it was a lot easier to adapt to than the Spanish spoken in Sonora, Mexico when I first lived there (as above, my Spanish is Guanajuato Spanish).
Most dictionaries I’ve looked at in the last 15 years indicate the specific country or countries if it’s specific, including the United States which is developing its own pidgin (if multiple versions forming a new version of the same language can be described such).
I would expect that Colombian actors in telenovelas intended for international distribution would primarily use the Andean accent rather than that from the Caribbean coast, which as I said is generally easier to understand.
Linguistics and phonetics texts frequently use, when further precision is not necessary, “Castilian (Spanish)” or “Iberian Spanish” as a collective term for “the dialects of Spanish spoken in Spain, considered as a group”. Either of these terms would commonly be contrasted with “Latin American Spanish” (= “the dialects of Spanish spoken in the Americas, considered as a group”).
Where further precision is required, specific names of countries or regions within countries would typically be used.
I thought it wasn’t called “high German” after it being a “lofty” or “proper” dialect, but rather that the “high” refers to the geography where it’s spoken (the more elevated regions of Germany in the south.)
Not really, most made-in-Spain movies use academic accents. Castilian (as in Old Castille) would be closest of all the regional ones, but Madrid manages to mix the laismos and loismos of OC with the J-for-S of Manchego.
Ah, so it linguistically refers to what I was thinking, but also it means standard German, although it is based on the linguistic High German dialects.
