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Spanish Dialects
Some of the regional varieties of the Spanish language are quite divergent from one another, especially in pronunciation and vocabulary, and less so in grammar. While all Spanish dialects adhere to approximately the same written standard, all spoken varieties differ from the written variety, to different degrees. There are differences between European Spanish (also called Peninsular Spanish) and the Spanish of the Americas, as well as many different dialect areas both within Spain and within the Americas. Chilean and Honduran Spanish have been identified by various linguists as the most divergent varieties. Prominent differences of pronunciation among dialects of Spanish include: # the maintenance or lack of distinction between the phonemes and (''distinción'' vs. ''seseo'' and '' ceceo''); # the maintenance or loss of distinction between phonemes represented orthographically by ''ll'' and ''y'' (''yeísmo''); # the maintenance of syllable-final vs. its weakening to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voice (phonetics)
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts: *Voicing can refer to the ''articulatory process'' in which the vocal folds vibrate, its primary use in phonetics to describe phones, which are particular speech sounds. *It can also refer to a classification of speech sounds that tend to be associated with vocal cord vibration but may not actually be voiced at the articulatory level. That is the term's primary use in phonology: to describe phonemes; while in phonetics its primary use is to describe phones. For example, voicing accounts for the difference between the pair of sounds associated with the English letters "s" and "z". The two sounds are transcribed as and to distinguish them from the English letters, which have several possible pronunciations, depe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Venezuelan Spanish
Venezuelan Spanish ( or ) refers to the Spanish spoken in Venezuela. Spanish was introduced in Venezuela by colonists. Most of them were from Galicia, Basque Country, Andalusia, or the Canary Islands. The last has been the most fundamental influence on modern Venezuelan Spanish, and Canarian and Venezuelan accents may even be indistinguishable to other Spanish-speakers. Italian and Portuguese immigrants from the late 19th and the early 20th century have also had an influence; they influenced vocabulary and its accent, given its slight sing-songy intonation, like Rioplatense Spanish. German settlers also left an influence when Venezuela was contracted as a concession by the King of Spain to the German Welser banking family (Klein-Venedig, 1528–1546). The Spaniards additionally brought African slaves, which is the origin of expressions such as ("excellent"), which comes from Yoruba . Other non-Romance words came from indigenous languages, such as (a type of coffee) and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cuban Spanish
Cuban Spanish is the variety of the Spanish language as it is spoken in Cuba. As a Caribbean variety of Spanish, Cuban Spanish shares a number of features with nearby varieties, including coda weakening and neutralization, non-inversion of Wh-questions, and a lower rate of dropping of subject pronouns compared to other Spanish varieties. As a variety spoken in Latin America, it has seseo and lacks the pronoun. Origins Cuban Spanish is most similar to, and originates largely from, the Spanish that is spoken in the Canary Islands and Andalusia. Cuba owes much of its speech patterns to the heavy Canarian migrations of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The accent of La Palma is the closest of the Canary Island accents to the Cuban accent. Many Cubans and returning Canarians settled in the Canary Islands after the revolution of 1959. Migration of other Spanish settlers (Asturians, Catalans, Castilians), and especially Galicians also occurred, but left less influence on t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Caribbean Spanish
* Caribbean Spanish ( es, español caribeño, ) is the general name of the Spanish dialects spoken in the Caribbean region. The Spanish language was introduced to the Caribbean in 1492 with the voyages of Christopher Columbus. It resembles the Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands, and, more distantly, the Spanish of western Andalusia. More precisely, the term in its strictest sense however refers to the Spanish language as it is spoken on the Caribbean island nations of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. In a much looser sense, it can also include the Caribbean coasts of Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela, and on the widest application of the phrase, it includes the Caribbean coastal regions of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Phonology * Seseo, where /θ/ and /s/ merge to , as in the rest of the Americas, in the Canary Islands and in southern Spain. * Yeísmo, where and merge to , as in many other Spanish dialects. * is debuccalize ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Central American Spanish
Central American Spanish ( es, español centroamericano or ) is the general name of the Spanish language dialects spoken in Central America. More precisely, the term refers to the Spanish language as spoken in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Panamanian Spanish is considered a variety of Caribbean Spanish. Variation While most vocabulary is common, each country has its variations, for instance following are examples of how to colloquial say ''corner store'' and ''soft drink'' in the different countries: In Guatemala, they are ''tienda'' or ''bodega'' in some parts of the country and ''agua,'' respectively, except for the Jutiapa department of Guatemala where a soft drink is known as a ''gaseosa'' (water is ''agua pura''). In El Salvador, they are ''tienda'' and ''gaseosa'' but more commonly called ''soda'' now. In Honduras, they are ''pulpería'' (in the north called ''trucha'' informally) and ''fresco''. In Nicaragua, they are ''venta'' or ''pulperí ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New Mexican Spanish
New Mexican Spanish ( es, español neomexicano, novomexicano) refers to a variety of Spanish spoken in the United States in New Mexico and the southern part of the state of Colorado. It includes a Traditional dialect spoken generally by the Hispanos of New Mexico, descendants of colonists who arrived in New Mexico before its annexation by the US, in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, and a Border dialect spoken in southern New Mexico. Despite a continual influence from Mexican Spanish to the south, New Mexico's unique political history and relative geographical and political isolation from the time of its annexation to the US have caused Traditional New Mexican Spanish to differ notably from the Spanish spoken in other parts of Hispanic America, with the exception of certain rural areas of Northern Mexico and Texas. Those reasons caused these main distinctive features of Traditional New Mexican Spanish, compared to other forms of Hispanic American Spanish: the preservat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mexican Spanish
Mexican Spanish ( es, español mexicano) is the variety of Dialect, dialects and Sociolect, sociolects of the Spanish language spoken in Mexican territory. Mexico has the largest number of Spanish speakers, with more than twice as many as in any other country in the world. Spanish is spoken by just over 99.2% of the population, being the mother tongue of 93.8% and the second language of 5.4%. Variation The territory of contemporary Mexico is not coextensive with what might be termed Mexican Spanish. The Spanish spoken in the southernmost state of Chiapas, bordering Guatemala, resembles the variety of Central American Spanish spoken in that country, where is used. Meanwhile, to the north, many Mexicans stayed in Texas after its independence from Mexico. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo many Mexicans remained in the territory ceded to the U.S., and their descendants have continued to speak Spanish within their communities in Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Neva ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Language Contact
Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Language contact can occur at language borders, between adstratum languages, or as the result of migration, with an intrusive language acting as either a superstratum or a substratum. Language contact occurs in a variety of phenomena, including language convergence, borrowing and relexification. The common products include pidgins, creoles, code-switching, and mixed languages. In many other cases, contact between speakers occurs but the lasting effects on the language are less visible; they may, however, include loan words, calques or other types of borrowed material. Multilingualism has likely been common throughout much of human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual. Meth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indigenous Languages Of The Americas
Over a thousand indigenous languages are spoken by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. These languages cannot all be demonstrated to be related to each other and are classified into a hundred or so language families (including a large number of language isolates), as well as a number of extinct languages that are unclassified because of a lack of data. Many proposals have been made to relate some or all of these languages to each other, with varying degrees of success. The most notorious is Joseph Greenberg's Amerind hypothesis, which however nearly all specialists reject because of severe methodological flaws; spurious data; and a failure to distinguish cognation, contact, and coincidence. Nonetheless, there are indications that some of the recognized families are related to each other, such as widespread similarities in pronouns (e.g., ''n''/''m'' is a common pattern for 'I'/'you' across western North America, and ''ch''/''k''/''t'' for 'I'/'you'/'we' is similarly found ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voseo
In Spanish grammar, () is the use of as a second-person singular pronoun, along with its associated verbal forms, in certain regions where the language is spoken. In those regions it replaces , i.e. the use of the pronoun and its verbal forms. can also be found in the context of using verb conjugations for with as the subject pronoun ( verbal voseo), as in the case of Chilean Spanish, where this form coexists with the ordinary form of . In all regions with , the corresponding unstressed object pronoun is and the corresponding possessive is . is used extensively as the second-person singular in Rioplatense Spanish (Argentina and Uruguay), Eastern Bolivia, Paraguayan Spanish, and Central American Spanish (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, southern parts of Chiapas and some parts of Oaxaca in Mexico). had been traditionally used even in formal writing in Argentina, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Philippines and Uruguay. In th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spanish Verbs
Spanish verbs form one of the more complex areas of Spanish grammar. Spanish is a relatively synthetic language with a moderate to high degree of inflection, which shows up mostly in Spanish conjugation. As is typical of verbs in virtually all languages, Spanish verbs express an action or a state of being of a given subject, and like verbs in most Indo-European languages, Spanish verbs undergo inflection according to the following categories: * Tense: past, present, or future * Number: singular or plural * Person: first, second or third * T–V distinction: familiar or formal * Mood: indicative, subjunctive, or imperative * Aspect: perfective or imperfective (distinguished only in the past tense as preterite and imperfect) * Voice: active or passive The modern Spanish verb paradigm (conjugation) has 16 distinct complete forms (tenses), i.e. sets of forms for each combination of tense, mood and aspect, plus one incomplete tense (the imperative), as well as three non-temporal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
