Altiplano colombiano, altiplano peruano, Costa Rica… basically those where a lot of the settlers were from Northern Spain.
ChicanoRojo, your teachers apparently forgot that in Spain there’s a lot of different accents. Ce, ci are pronounced ze, zi in northern accents, but not in southern ones; actually, the worst southern ones sometimes overcompensate with ceceo, pronouncing the s as z (as in that example in one of my posts, “Lunah con eze ar finá”). Most of the emigration to the Americans was from Andalusia and Extremadura, so you guys inherited their accent and evolved from there.
Seseo is always a regional variant, never a physical defect. Ceceo can be a regional variant like for my coworker, or a physical defect (many people go into ceceo when they 'abe a go’d abd deid doze iz clogged).
Well. This was elementary school, so I don’t think they would get too far on linguistics w/ seven year olds. The point was that at least as far as I know, the differentiation between “s” and “z” is generally something practiced in Spain . From reading another posts, in certain areas of Venezuela this also the case.
Or maybe when he spoke to them, he used more “standard” Italian rather than his regional dialect.
As people have noted in other threads about similar languages, people speaking them can often understanding each other when they are making an effort to do so, even if one couldn’t understand the other when listening to him speaking to his compatriots.
I think it is not so much a regional thing but more of a personal thing in Venezuela. Then again, we did get a large spanish influx in recent history (both from the civil war and WWII) so we have plenty of models to copy.
And when most teachers do it for dictation, it sounds artificial and just for the purpose of clarifying the spelling.
Frankly, I don’t even think of Cuba as a Spanish-speaking country because it’s so different from other Latin American dialects. River Plate Spanish (roughly Argentinian Spanish, for the uninitiated) is an odd little duck, too; its informal vernacular is pretty unique IME.
Then again, I learned most of my Spanish from a girlfriend from Baja California, Mexico; and a lot of Spanish speakers, even Mexicans, mistake my dialect for Argentinian. (I and my ex pronounce “y” and “ll” like Argentinians; that is, like the “s” in treasure or pleasure.)
Note: this doesn’t contradict Polycarp–a number of dialects including River Plate have speakers that range from pronouncing “y” and “ll” anywhere from treasure to shopping to Jones.
Portuguese is a pluricentric language, meaning it’s not mutually intelligible among speakers of different dialects. That is, if a Brazilian tried to have a conversation with a Portuguese or an Angolan, he would almost feel that they were literally speaking two different languages. Spaniards in Brazil can’t understand Portuguese because the Portuguese in Brazil have trouble understanding Portuguese. More info.
If by “standard British accent” you mean Received Pronunciation, the standard dialect of middle-class-and-up London, I would imagine almost no Americans have trouble with it. But the UK is amazing in its language variation, and there are a lot of accents within the British Isles that even Britons have trouble with. Last night I saw Hot Fuzz and I missed a couple of lines because of the accents; the protagonist from London met two people in a small English country town who he couldn’t understand without translators. They could understand him though–because “everyone and their mum” had seen countless middle-class Londoners on TV and in the movies.
Really, it’s hard to find a wide variety of British accents even in British film and TV. It seems like most reasonably successful British actors are Londoners or have conditioned themselves to sound like Londoners. Consider that most Hollywood actors sound like Southern Californians or Midwesterners in 90% of their roles.
Like almost all Latin American Spanish accents, people in the Dominican Republic definitely don’t make a distinction between s, the soft c and z. Imagine my surprise when today someone pronounced a z the Spanish way (th) to clarify that the place name he was mentioning was spelled with a z, not an s. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone doing that here before. It’s almost as if they were saying - this is how z/c really should be pronounced, even if we don’t do it that way here.
And Nava - I haven’t met that many people from Canarias but one bloke I spoke to could have been Cuban, the accent was so similar.
Slightly off topic but one accent peculiarity I’ve seen several times on American television and films is that Irish and Scottish accents are seen to be interchangeable to a certain degree. David O’Hara has been cast in The District and The Departed as an Irish person and to my ears has a quite strong Scottish accent. Then of course Sean Connery has played an Irish character several times without really attempting to modify his accent.
That’s not right. I speak Brazilian Portuguese and when I was in Portugal, I didn’t have that much trouble with the accent. It took me an afternoon to get used to the accents of some of the people I met in the service industries in Porto but that was the worst of it. They had less trouble with my accent since they get a lot of Brazilian telenovelas in Portugal. Even when I used Brazilian terms, they knew what I meant. An example was I ordered a draft beer using the term chopp, they don’t use the term there, but they had heard it on TV.
I always thought that the strangest versions of Spanish, at least to my Caribbean ears, was that of Northern Spain and Argentina. There’s too much Italian in the Argentinian Spanish, and to us it sound just too funny. Luckily I am fluent in Argentinian after years of watching an Argentinian cooking channel (donde hablan un español bastante prolijo ).
The closest I have heard to Dominican Spanish was in Panama, it was much closer than the Spanish from Puerto Rico (with their French-sounding Rs) and Cuba. I never have any trouble understanding people from other Spanish speaking countries, the problems is usually a matter of local slang. One has to be careful, you never now what word has a sexual connotation where.
Huh. Ignorance fought. The Wiki article was my only exposure to the issue, and that made it sound like the typical speaker of Brazilian Portuguese would struggle to communicate in (say) Porto.
Would you say, though, that the difference between the two dialects is unusually large? Compared to, say, Received Pronunciation vs. Standard American English, or Castilian vs. Latin American Spanish?
That’s very interesting. I know that Panamanian Spanish is basically a Caribbean dialect, and perceive similarities with Puerto Rican and Cuban dialects. But I am not familiar with Dominican Spanish. It perhaps has something to do with when the areas fell out of direct contact with Spain - the DR and Panama (as part of Colombia) gained independence by the early 1800s, while Cuba and PR remained colonies until 1898.
I’d say that the difference is about the same as Castilian Spanish vs Latin American Spanish. There is a bit more difference than Received pronuniciation and Standard American English, but not much more. There are a few differences in how you might say things and the slang may differ but thats about it. What differs is the way they might pronounce things but that isn’t that hard to get used to.
Brazilian telenovelas are shown in Portugal and in the other Portuguese speaking countries. They are shown in other parts of the world as well. I’ve heard that they are popular in Russia as well.
As a result of that, a lot of Brazilian terms are fairly well understood by other Portuguese speakers. I’ve met folks from Mozambique as well and didn’t have much trouble with their accent either.
Well who’da thunk. It’s funny how TV seems to be making “New World” dialects–American English, Mexican and Argentinian Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, maybe even Quebecois French?–ubiquituous in places that “should be” influenced more by Europe.
when today someone pronounced a z the Spanish way (th) to clarify that the place name he was mentioning was spelled with a z, not an s. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone doing that here before. It’s almost as if they were saying - this is how z/c really should be pronounced, even if we don’t do it that way here.