Which “standard” British accent? The BBC accent once known as Received Pronunciation? Extreme versions of this one can sound as stilted and phony to the American ear as “pure” Castellano does to many Mexicans. But we can definitely understand it.
However, shows set in The North of England & farther afield can be a bit more difficult. Of course, “the right people” speak a more standard English. But Tony Bourdain visited Ireland in a recent show. He toured historically troubled neighborhoods of Belfast with two cab drivers–Catholic & Protestant. Then he bought them both a drink. They got on well–things are improving. But the show supplied subtitles–which were quite useful.
And to me, y’all sound like you’re talking way too slow. As I am a non-native speaker, I find Mexicans and Central Americans (especially the Ticos!) easier to understand than the Caribeños. But the dialects I’m most accustomed to are Caribbean, so they seem normal to me.
I had a Honduran friend who used to act like she couldn’t understand me if I didn’t clearly enunciate every single damned S, like “a la tre” is so difficult. To me, hearing “Busco a mi mamá” instead of “Búcoa mimamá” is just strange. Also, my Y and LL are pretty much the same as English J and my J is like the German CH. I’m told I sound Cuban, and I think I do most of the time.
It’s a function of what you’re used to. I will say this, though – I find most dialects easily intelligible except the Argentinian (vos tenés, anyone? “Me zhamo Ariel” for the LL?) and the Europeans. The “cinco” = “thinko” and “Me parethes cansada” and the use of vosotros all throw me because I’m not used to them. They are different enough that I have to work on comprehension for now. If I heard them more often, it would eventually not be a problem.
Certain areas of Mexican do have the Caribbean accent, specifically the coastal areas on the Caribbean areas such Tampico in Tamaulipas, Veracruz, and Yucatan. Also, in certain areas of Guerrero where there was mix of Indian, Spanish, and African cultures.
It depend. Northerners (Norteños) are stereotypically shown as SHOUTING everything and using “-ao” in certain words. For example, “Ah chingado!” a northerner is supposed to say 'AH, CHINGAO!".
LOL…the easiest way for a Mexican to get into a fight with Boricua. “Say your r’s and s’s!”
If you follow Argentinan soccer and check out some movies from that country, you’ll eventually get the cadence of their Spanish. I met some Argies here in my region and I always find a hoot to hear their “LL” in a “zh” manner. Now. Spaniards. Depending on their region, their slang and accents can still make it hard for me. I can listen to TVEspaña w/o a problem, but once you get to other medium where is not for international consumption, I am lost.
Actually, I find this perfectly believable. My friend has a completely generic British accent (not regional, not cockney, standard Kensington-schooled English). He came back from a trip to NY & Florida absolutely baffled because half the people he spoke to couldn’t understand him, but the Swede and Australian he was travelling with had no such problems.
Geordie, Scots, Sarf Lahndan etc. don’t even count as English…
The movie “Motorcycle Diaries”/“Diarios de motocicleta” is, among other things, an interesting survey of some of the dialects of South America. To summarize loosely, it is about a road trip in Argentina and winds thru Chile and Peru, with many interactions with the locals, and the main character is a young Che Guevara. I’m not a native speaker, accents are difficult for me to understand, and I can never ID them. But there is a scene where he is talking to an indigenous woman in Cuzco, she sounded clear as glass to me – I studied in Quito, Ecuador, also the Andian accent.
The problems I have are more educated vs. uneducated than due to regional accents.
In the same team, we had:
two Navarrese and one guy from Santander (northern accents)
one guy from Tenerife (could pass for Argentinian most of the time)
one guy from Huelva and a woman from Granada (southern accents)
The southern accent includes problems pronouncing the Z and S phonemes; the guy was cultured enough to bypass this by choosing alternate words; he was able to provide definitions if needed. The woman? Oh God. Her lastname ended in an S. Let’s say it was Lunas. She pronounced it as Lunah, which is how people wrote it; then she got angry that they hadn’t understood; she’d just yell LU-NAJ! and then they wrote Lunaj; she’d get angrier and yell louder… never thought of providing some freaking ID (which is what I do from the start because my own lastname is just too bloody long) or of saying “Lunah with an s at the end” (Lunah con eze ar finá). I’ve heard her on the phone with friends and family and there were always things she had to repeat two, three times in any conversation, so it wasn’t “the rest of us” who had a problem.
My experience is that most people automatically try to use their most “neutral” accent and vocabulary when in the presence of someone from a different accent. You still assume that there will be points when you have to explain a word but hey, it’s a big language and learning more words is Good For You.
My first conversation with a group including people from Argentina, Colombia (altiplano mostly), two different regions of Mexico, Brasil (they insisted in speaking Spanish instead of teaching us Portuguese), Italy (these spoke Italian) and Spain where the only things that needed clarification were technical terms that myself and my coworkers were introducing to the rest of the group. That same group had “kodak moments” when the Mexicans found out that a certain word meant different things for both of them, that was funny. And there was that issue about finding a word for “take” (as in “takes the data from elsewhere in the database”) that wouldn’t be offensive or give the giggles to anybody… we settled on “jalar” but figured it’s probably offensive somewhere
Actually, and this is very funny since their accent is also similar to that from one of the Canary Islands, Argentinian might be not so much a dialect of Spanish as… a mixture of Galego and Italian.
We were watching an Italian soccer player who’d been living in Galicia for three weeks and if we hadn’t know who he was and where from, we would have pegged him as Rioplatense right there.
Y’all don’t get a prize for figuring out the two most common sources of immigration to Argentina
I understand Portuguese; I can’t speak it because I haven’t had enough exposition to it. I think that’s like people who complain about not being able to understand Catalan… if you can’t, either you’re a furriner or you need to wash your ears.
This is a question that bears deeper exploration, I think.
A few weeks ago, I was down with broncho-pneumonia and spent a week in bed. I found that the only channels I could tolerate on basic-extended cable were AMC and TMC. I saw many old movies that purported to have English characters portrayed by Americans with really, really fake English accents.
I’m guessing that until say 1965 or 1975, it was rare to see someone with a genuine English accent in an American-made movie or television program. Actual British productions have always been favored by the educated, but that’s a limited and self-selected sample.
Nowadays, the “standard British accent” or Received Pronunciation is no longer really the iron-clad standard for British productions. What about the Scots accents of Trainspotting or the Northern accents of The Full Monty or the Welsh accents of The Englishman Who Went up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain?
Actually this reminds me of the weekend camping in Canada that I spent with a Mexican, Italian, Colombian, and Liechtensteinian (no, this isn’t the prelude to a joke). I’m the only native English speaker; the rest are in Ontario for language school (and one is my wife). The Colombian speaks German, as she’s living in Germany with her husband, so she and the Liechtensteinian get along. I can still manage to mumble a few words of German myself. The Mexican and Colombian are naturally able to speak with each other, and I’m fluent-enough in Spanish. That leaves the Italian as the odd man out. Naturally as English students, we tried to speak English for everything, but when things got rough or they needed to speak in a hurry, the Italian would speak Italian, and the Colombian and Mexican would pick up enough to get the idea. They’d speak Spanish in turn, and he’d understand them just as well as they he. I mostly only understood the Spanish half of the conversations, of course.
Now it’s not much of a trick to read Italian, Portuguese, or even French and get the gist, but I was impressed by their mutual comprehension while speaking and listening.
Funny, that… In Spain that may be the standard, but for the Caribbean region, the seseo is the standard, NOT a defect. It is normal for us not to differentiate c, z or s in most cases. Not because we cannot pronounce it due to some physiological thing (we’re perfectly capable of doing so) but because no one here does that.
I took good Spanish classes for 12 years (heck my whole education minus English was in Spanish). We were taught many things, but we were NEVER forced to “correct” our seseo. That (of all the things my accent has) is the least vulgar or incorrect of all.
I do agree with you that the difference is mostly between educated and uneducated (or professional vs vulgar), not between regional accents. I can understand newscasts from every place, and I can talk with my friends from different countries, but don’t put me with Juan Bobo from Guatemala cuz I’m probably not going to understand what he says (well, the words, but they don’t make sense).
Where was the guy from in Italy? When I was in Florence, I found I could get by reasonably well by speaking Spanish and then trying to understand Italian (they did better then I did, of course). My guess is that if the Italian person had been from Sicily it would have been much harder.
Aye, sorry for not including Mexicans (and I don’t think Guatemalans, Hondurans, Panamanians, Colombians, and Venezuelans do it either, unless it’s something very very regional).
I just mentioned Caribbean because that’s the one I am more accustomed (and the one in which my education was done).
AFAIK, seseo or pronouncing “s” and “z” similarly, is done across Latin America. When I went to public school in Mexico, I was thought that in Spain “s” and “z” are pronounced differently and that it is correct and proper usage of Spanish. But, since we were in Mexico, such differentiation should be noted, but not necessarily practiced.
