NO LATIN AMERICAN SPANISH

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS LATIN AMERICAN SPANISH 

2010-03-12

By Carl Stoll

I can assure you from personal experience, including systematic observation and  note-taking,  that there is NO SUCH THING as Latin American Spanish.

Argentine Spanish is more similar to European Spanish than it is to Colombian Spanish. Mexican Spanish is similar to nothing. And that is a typical situation. Consequently the term "Latin American Spanish" is also meaningless.

There are only two or three traits with respect to which the Spanish of the Americas is clearly distinguished from the Spanish of Spain. They are:

a. Phonetics: lisping (i.e. pronouncing like the English TH in “throat”). In Northern and Central Spain the  letter Z and the letter C in  the combinations CI & CE are lisped. In southern Spain and the Americas, on the contrary, Z, CI & CE are pronounced like S.

b. Pronouns & verb forms: In Spain a certain verb form and its attendant personal pronoun are used for the second person plural, but are not used anywhere in the Americas (or the Canary Islands). The pronoun in question is vosotros and the pertinent verb endings in present indicative are –áis or –éis, depending on conjugation. In the Canaries and the Americas the pronoun is ustedes and the verb forms are those of the 3^rd person plural.

c. Pronouns & verb forms: There is a third trait that appears in all Spanish speaking countries of the Americas, but only in certain regions of each country (except in Guatemala & Chile, where use is uniform nationwide but diverges from usage in the other countries), and is nowhere used in Spain. It is the use of the familiar 2^nd person singular vos  instead of the standard tú. The attendant verb forms are variants of the  verb forms for vosotros shown in (b).


d. (added on 3 March 2013)  I must add a fourth category of differences between the Spanish of the Iberian Peninsula and that of the American continents: to wit, a fairly large (but who knows how large?) number of technical terms introduced in the 20th century, when Spaniards tended to borrow from French and Spanish-Americans tended to borrow from English. A few examples: 

English	Hispanic America	Spain
Direct current (electricity)	Corriente directa	Corriente continua
Computer	Computadora	Ordenador

Those are all I can think of at the moment, but there are more. However, I must point out that this dichotomy between Spain and the Americas does not apply to all, or even most, technical terms. On the whole, technical terms are subject to the same free-for-all that prevails in other domains of terminology, as well as grammar, pronunciation, etc. etc. Whoever claims the contrary must provide hard evidence in the form of word counts, technical dictionary entries, etc.

These three traits plus one trend are the only ones in which the Castilian of Spain is clearly distinguished from that of the Americas. In every other respect it's a free-for all, i.e. the chances of European Spanish choosing option A and all American countries choosing the same alternative option B, is close to zero.

These three traits  plus one trend by themselves, in my opinion, do not suffice to constitute a language variant. Their combined effect on comprehension is not overwhelming. Certainly there are vocabulary differences between, say, Uruguay and Panama, that are far greater obstacles to comprehension than the one that these three differences combined pose to comprehension between Europe and the Americas taken as a whole.

I would like to stress that in my research on Spanish dialects I recall having encountered only a handful of important vocabulary difference that clearly distinguish Iberian from American Spanish. In Spain “foreign affairs” is called asuntos exteriores, while in the Americas the term relaciones exteriores is used. In Spain the term for “subsidy” is subvención, whereas in many American countries the term used is subsidio. However I don't know  whether subsidio is universal in the Americas. “Iron curtain” is called cortina de hierro in the Americas and telón de acero in Spain. Those are the only ones I can think of offhand, apart from the as yet unknown number of technical terms cited under item (d).

Many people mistakenly believe that in the Americas the only term used to designate the Spanish language is castellano, whereas in Spain the term español is used.  I must point out that español is used not only in Spain, but also in Mexico, Central America and northern South America. Likewise castellano is in common use in Spain, where is serves to distinguish Spanish from Catalan and other languages spoken in that country. This started after the Spanish Constitution of 1978 declared Castilian, Catalan, Galician and Basque to be "lenguas españolas". However, the Royal Academy in Madrid still calls itself "Real Academia de la Lengua Española". Nonetheless, this name is of recent origin. From its inception in the 18th century until 1923 it was called ".. de la Lengua Castellana". The name change occurred in the same year in which General Miguel Primo de Rivera staged a coup d'etat and became military dictator to forestall the collapse of the unpopular King Alfonso XIII and was associated with a centralist ideology that glorified Castile and its language.  . 

Consequently to speak of an entity called ¨Latin American Spanish¨ is to conjure up a pathetic little creature consisting of only 3 parts, which are not or only barely interconnected, and are of little practical importance.  In other words “Latin American Spanish” is a phantom, a mythological creature created for the convenience of busy lexicographers with little time for analysis.

My ProZ web page is:  http://www.proz.com/profile/76326

Regards, Carl Stoll


See also Wikipedia: Spanish language in the Americas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_Spanish