Argentine accent is distinctive? How so? is it because of the fact that a significant portion of the Argentine population are defendant of people who had origins from outside Iberia, especially Italy and a Germany?
The Argentine accent (or, more accurately, Río de la Plata accent) is very distinctive in that the /y/ and /ll/ sounds are voiced with a j sound. Think “Zsa Zsa Gabor” or “measure.” Also, they use a different second-person pronoun (vos, instead of tú) which results in slightly different conjugations when speaking in the second person.
The Italian influence is part of it. However, one of the most distinctive things is the use ofvosas the second person singular pronoun instead of* tu*, which is found mainly in Rioplatense Spanish and some Central American dialects. They also use a “sh” or “j” sound for ll/y sound of other dialects. And Argentines say Che! a lot, the source of the nickname of Che Guevara. There are also lots of differences in vocabulary.
Sure, but the vast majority of native English speakers would be covered by RP or US newscaster english. Hell, the Kiwis, Australians and Canadians combined have the same number of native English speakers as the UK does.
That’s kind of where we’re going- for all 300 million+ US English speakers, the “standard” accent for news, etc… is US newscaster english. For the rest, RP would serve.
What are the Spanish equivalents? ISTR that in Spanish class back in the day, Cuban was held up as somewhat neutral
If that’s so, it’s astonishing to me. Cuban (and other “Caribbean” Spanish accents, like Puerto Rican and Panamanian) is very distinctive, characterized by the dropping of final consonants, especially “s,” as indicated in the joke in post #4 of this thread. It also tends to be spoken rapidly. For me it’s one of the most difficult accents to understand. It would be sort of like regarding Cockney or Brooklynese as neutral.
Ah, but which Madrid one? Las Rozas (osea) is the equivalent of Valley Girl. Getafe (ejque) is one of the stereotypical “bumpkin” ones, although I guess in this case it counts as urban bumpkin…
The accent that’s closest to “standard” for Spain - but not for Latin America - is Valladolid’s, and they have some grammatical peculiarities that newscasters from there do their best to lose because again they’re too strong a marker (they use some pronouns differently from everybody else, where “everybody else” includes Spain’s former colonies).
Queen Letizia would have such an accent I suppose? Newscaster accent I mean?
Yeah, and it’s so rare to hear her speak non-professionally that I don’t know whether she uses any others. The same goes for Felipe.
The Queen is from Oviedo, and spent her childhood there. It’s a long way from Valladolid. Then she spent most of her teenage years in Madrid. I don’t think she has ever lived in Valladolid.
She was a journalist and newscaster, but I didn’t understand Nava to say that newscasters in Spain assume a Valladolid accent. While the Vallodolid accent is close to standard, he said that newscasters from Valladolid make a point of dropping certain characteristics typical of Valldolid.
Both.
TV personnel and actors, in general, try to “drop” their regional accents and approach that of Valladolid, which is held as “the standard to which our spelling is closest”. In fact, this is often done by many other people to assist communication with people from other areas. In the last 20 years or so, there has been less of a bias against regional accents, but still: the way Antonio Banderas speaks in most of his Spanish movies is much closer to Valladolid than to Málaga; Penélope Cruz surprised Trueba phoning him with a “southern” accent that he had no idea she could use (she was born in Madrid and had always worked in a Valladolid accent, but her parents are from Extremadura and she spent her summer childhoods there). The Valladolid accent is viewed as “neutral”, it is what’s used in dubbings and voiceovers.
And while Letizia is from Oviedo and has also lived in Mexico, I’ve known quite a few people who couldn’t use their local accents, they spoke “Academic Spanish” and that was it. I don’t know whether she can switch accents or not. Olvido Gara was born in Mexico but I’ve never heard her speaking anything but academic Spanish and I have heard her say that her Mexican accent would be so bad she’d find it disrespectful to try and use it.
How distinctive are Catalan, Galician or Basque accent when speaking Spanish?
There’s all kinds of ranges; those are bilingual regions, you get people for whom Spanish is their secondary language (and these are more likely to have a strong accent), others who don’t speak the local language at all but whose speech is influenced by it. I don’t speak Basque, nor did my father, but the local Spanish dialect is peppered with Basque expressions.
Depending on which region/language we’re talking about there will be phonetic differences or grammatical mistakes; for some speakers it’s completely unnoticeable; others get mistaken as being from another neighboring region (nobody ever asks me whether I’m Basque, or Navarrese - when people do notice an accent they ask about either Saragossa or Catalonia, and don’t ask me why it is a city for one option and a region for the other). The kind of mistakes made in Spanish by someone whose primary language is Basque are often linked to gender, so we describe this “mis-grammar” as gramática Vizcaína: pollo gorda, gallina flaco (grammar from Vizcaya: the chickens are female and the hens are male). In Catalan it’s often prepositions and phonetics, most noticeably the l; many false friends.