Years ago it was Castilian, but this hasn’t been the case for a long time. I asked one student of Spanish and he told me it was Columbian, but I can’t verify this.
I do know that it is not “Columbian” because that is an incorrect spelling. The correct spelling is “Colombian”.
Here in Southern California we learned the Mexican dialect but then the teachers were Mexican-American.
Haj
I graduated High School in 1988 and we were told it was Castillian Spanish we were learning, with some Mexican usages thrown in (since we were far more likely to cross paths with Mexicans than with Spaniards.)
As to what they’re teaching now- I dunno. If I were on the school board, I’d gun for Mexican Spanish, but that’s just me.
La gente canta con ardor. Y viva Espana! [sub]Sorry. I don’t know how to make diacritical marks and upside-down exclamation points on my keyboard at work.[/sub]
Whatever the teachers happened to speak.
I had one teacher who was Panamanian, one who had spent several years in Chile, and one who had done the same in Mexico. (The sub we had most often was from Spain, she “talked funny”).
Of course, when I got to college, I couldn’t speak a lick, but I could understand my Mexican American roommates when they spoke. The people I met from Puerto Rico may as well have been speaking greek.
I studied Spanish in the DC suburbs in the early to mid 1980s. I can’t pin it down any further than “some variety of Latin American” - i.e., we pronounced all our Cs and Zs as Ss and were taught that vosotros existed but we didn’t need to learn how to conjugate it because it was only used in Spain.
Well not all our Cs, but you know what I mean.
[QUOTE=pyrrthon1]
Years ago it was Castilian, but this hasn’t been the case for a long time. I asked one student of Spanish and he told me it was Columbian, but I can’t verify this.
[/QUOTE
The Spanish taught today in most of the country has always been known as "Kitchen"Spanish,probably becaue it was the language of Mexican house help throughout the southwest.
It was also known as “cowboy” Spanish because of the interaction between the Cowboy and the Vaquero—which word became “buckeroo” north of the border.
I have used that form of spanish in all of South America and Spain[even in Brazil]
—and have had good results----and a good many smiles at my efforts.
Castillian is/was the preferred version taught in The UK-------but they have had little exposure to the “Spanish” of the Americas.
Strangely the impact of Puerto Rican and Cuban spanish has been minimal------with some people insisting that Puerto Ricans do not speak spanish but rather an americanized verion of that language.
But–who’s to say?
Quien Sabe?
EZ
iEs muy facil! Usa el “i”…
That’s pretty much exactly what I’d say about the Spanish we were taught in the mid-late 1980’s in suburban Dallas-Fort Worth.
I seem to recall one of our teachers (or perhaps the foreword of a text) describing it as “American” Spanish (vs. Castillian), but I’m not certain about that.
My Spanish never became good enough for me to distinguish between the various accents and dialects spoken between the Rio Grande and Tierra del Fuego. Castillian Spanish, with its dramatically different pronunciation of some syllables, is markedly different to my ear.
My Spanish isn’t very good. At typical conversational speed it all tends to run together, and my vocabulary is too damn small for anything more than primitive communication. 
[nitpick] Usa la “i.”[/nitpick] Or hit Num Lock, then alt+173
Anyhow, yes. Here, (Southern California) what we learn is what’s spoken in Mexico. I can recognize the vosotros forms, but I didn’t learn them. Some of our textbooks have it though, and we’re told to ignore it.
At my (California) school, we learn Latin American spanish. In verb conjugation, our teacher shows us the vosotros form but says we don’t have to know it and never tests us on it, we learn some Mexican-Spanish specific words, etc. I don’t know enought about the langauge to tell you exactly what variety of Latin American spanish we’re learning, though. I would guess Mexican, simply because the head of the language department grew up in Mexico.
ours is sorta a mix of all of them. we learned the vosotros form… and some other words that are only used in spain. in the book itll say like
vosotros (solo en Esp.)
The Spanish taught in schools in the US is generally your basic standard Spanish (the “correct” forms) but without the vosotros form being used, and a more Latin American pronunciation of c before i and e, and z. I wouldn’t say it’s exactly one dialect as teachers tend to avoid teaching you slang. But of course they are influenced by whatever dialects they grew up with. So, I had teachers who were Mexican, Castillian, Salvadoreño, and even a Dutch woman (yes, she spoke more castillian though).
I had a pretty easy time in Querétaro understanding people there, as the accent wasn’t too “sing song”, unless men got together and then it became some strange highly sing-song accented form. The women seemed to talk a lot more clearly and less sing-song. The men also tended to use “guey” at the end of every sentence or every other word.
The accent I have the hardest time understanding from Mexico so far is the accent from Oaxaca. It’s been a while since I’ve heard it, but it’s not too surprising since a lot of people from Oaxaca are indigenous, and a good many don’t even speak Spanish.
I remember being told that it was Mexican, but nobody had a chance of knowing if that was true. None of our Spanish teachers were that good anyway.
I wonder if it’s United States Spanish? I’ve got a pretty comprehensive English-Spanish dictionary, and it lists where the words are used. For example on the English side, it specifies USA, Britain, and others. On the Spanish side, it specifies many, many more countries, but the USA is included for some specific usages.
Yeah, I know the problem: what’s really USA Spanish (what’s really USA English?)?
In 1989-90 I took a year of Spanish (and French and German so didn’t get much out of it). We used vosotros and were tested on it, but pronounciation wasn’t continental. We were given some examples of usages in different countries, too, like boligrafo which I think is really a pluma, and different words that meant bus, and maybe something that in some countries you ride a bicycle and in others you walk it.
Try looking in the recent Special symbols, redux thread.
As I understand it, there’s a sort of “generalized” Hispano-American accent that is not spoken anywhere but will be understood everywhere, consisting of what’s spoken from Paraguay north to Guatemala in terms of accent and with localisms omitted, which is usually what is taught in American schools. No theismo (which is not religious but references the Castilian lisping usage), -ll- with a Y sound rather than a -LY- or -J- sound, final -S sounded, etc. The “Usted” forms are taught first, followed by when it’s appropriate to tutoyer and how to form it. Stilted, grammatically correct forms precede normal idiomatic colloquial usage, which is third-year or later. (“Learn the rules first, then learn when it’s OK to break them…”)
Although non native speakers don’t often have a good enough grasph of the cultural contexts in when to use a lot of the “higher” idioms that my professors said “stick with the standard. It’s better to be seen as bookish than get the nuance wrong”. Besides, native speakers can tell you’re a non native speaker anyway.
My guess would be that it is referring to ‘Spanglish’ words. Words used in Spanish by some Hispanics near the border or in the USA that are obviously taken from English words.
For example, a Hispanic near the (US) border is more likely to use the word carro instead of coche, the later being the correct Spanish word for car.
I say Hispanic because using Spanglish on the border is not, in my experience, confined soley to Mexicans. I have heard this usage by many from Central America (once they have been here long enough).