Texan here. We learned Mexican Spanish (seseo, yeismo, ustedes for everyone, etc) It’s been years since I had to use it for my job but IIRC there’s a difference in the subjunctive verbs as well.
There are also distinct varieties of Spanish spoken in the US that differ from Mexican Spanish. As a general rule, if a common word has a similar-sounding English cognate (often false cognate) the cognate will be used. truck = troca instead of camión, concrete (as in cement) = concreto instead of hormigón, carpet = carpeta instead of alfombra, to park (a car) = parquear instead of estacionar, and so on. This is from my years working as a bilingual call center agent.
In New Mexico we learned Mexican spanish
Do you mean New Mexican Spanish?
It is the same language. In fact some regions of Spain suck at speaking their own language. Spanish has a central authority that collects and organizes Spanish as it is used in the real world and it codifies it into its official rules. Furthermore, because of its grammar and syntax rules, you always know exactly how every word is pronounced just by reading it. There might be accents and regional synonyms, but there is a “standard” Spanish that everyone learns speaks.
And then when to actually spend any time in a place where Spanish is the first language, you start to understand that, like any language, there’s the academic form (commonly taught to non-native speakers as a second or third etc. language), and then there’s the local version, complete with an the colloquialisms and slang and unique pronunciations. In Argentina, the double-L (which school taught me makes a “y” sound, “ella” being pronounced basically “ey-ya”) is commonly produced as more of a soft “J” sound (“ella” becomes “ey-jha”). As far as my (admittedly limited) knowledge goes, that’s really not common outside of Argentina. And then in Bolivia, especially among native descendants (Quechua and Aymara predominantly), the double-r (which school taught me is one of two conditions when you roll the R with a tongue trill) is more commonly pronounced almost like a “zh” (“herramienta” becomes “hezhamienta”). Again, not common outside of Bolivia. Spain has that classic “Barthelona” lisp, and uses the “vosotros” pronoun where most South American Spanish speakers would probably use “ustedes” (basically “y’all” vs. “esteemed plural second persons”). And that’s not even getting into which verb tenses are used most widely in different regions. There’s like 14 or 15 specific verb tenses in Spanish to English’s 7, and in school I was taught to use specific ones to communicate effectively; then I went and spent two months in Bolivia pretty much never using past perfect or predicate, instead using past imperfect for 95% of interactions, only using past perfect with other folks que hablan español como segunda lengua, or in a few very specific interactions where more specifically was required than would be so in common, everyday interactions.
Colombians, at least Paisas, also have the double ll = j sound and use vosotros! Spanish dialects can get wild lol
Neat! I probably never would have known that if you hadn’t told me!
Same language but with huge differences world wide, as languages tend to do. Believe a person whom lived in Mexico for over 2 decades, Mexican Spanish is NOT the exact same. It’s mostly similar and you’ll be able to understand but it will be immediately obvious that it’s very different.
I watch Spain Spanish movies and regularly have trouble understanding it all
Spaniard living in the US here to clarify how our language works. Spaniards are the best at speaking their own language by definition. We make the language, and we decide how it evolves. When you say many Spaniards suck at speaking their own language, I think you are getting confused with the many dialects that exist within the Spain. Some dialects, while being perfectly and dramatically correct, are very hard for non-native speakers to understand. Pronunciation of letters may change from dialect to dialect, but the grammar is basically the same.
The authority that sets the Spanish language grammar rules (Real Academia Española - RAE) is in Spain, and it’s rules only apply to the “standard” Spanish dialect spoken in Spain, which is also known as Castillian. However, there are multiple other dialects of Spanish within Spain (and multiple other languages that are not Spanish - Galego, Catalan, Euskera, etc). Other countries that speak other Spanish dialects choose if they want to follow or not the rules set by the RAE, and many Spanish dialects do not follow those rules. Some Spanish speaking countries have their own organizations to define their Spanish dialects. There are dialects of Spanish that are very different from the original Castillian Spanish. For example, listen to Argentinian Spanish, and compare it to Castillian Spanish. The difference is noticeable even for non-Spanish speakers. They also use a slightly different grammar.
Dosen’t Mexico speak Spanish?
In the same way that Americans speak English.
Sure, their language is mutual intelligible with English, but if an Englishman comes over here and asks for some chips, they’re going to get a bag of crisps. They’ll mess up verb conjunction on a bunch of collective nouns.
And bless the souls of my Australian mates who come here and call everyone a cunt.
Because it’s the same language. I grew up in Argentina, and the “Spanish” (the name of the language is actually Castilian because there are multiple languages in Spain) we learn at school is the “Spain” one. In reality it’s the language as defined by the Real Academia Española so the language is the same (yes it includes the vosotros conjugation, no, no one outside Spain actually uses that but we learn it in school).
The differences between Mexican, Argentinian or Spanish Castilian is more in the pronunciation and the use of some words, but the language we learn at school is all the same, and I imagine it’s the same one that you learn too.
That being said, using vosotros to us sounds similar to how using thy might sound in English. A good teacher would explain that outside of Spain we use ustedes which uses the plural third person conjugation (i.e. the same one as ellos), but the correct plural second person is vosotros.
Here in Canada we learn Parisian French in school despite Quebecois French being one of our national languages.
It’s probably because, like BBC/Oxford English, those are the places that have an “official” version of the language they try to preserve. Same thing happens with Portugese, despite Brazilian Portugese being more commonly spoken than Portugal Portugese.
And in Switzerland we have to learn quebeccan French. And so the circle closes.
(we train it at the end when we train understanding non-standard pronounciations)
Well yeah, but you also learn Swiss German and Swiss French and Parisian French, and Italian is an option isn’t it?
I don’t know what we you’re referring to, but in the part of central Ontario where my nephew attends school, the French immersion schools are most definitely teaching Quebecois French.
I tried speaking real French with my nephew and he reacted as if I was a space alien.
When I was in school in the 1970s it was because they couldn’t get French teachers from Quebec. The youth wanted to stay and build a sovereign Quebec. So they imported French teachers from France and I speak like a French Duke.
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Forgive me but I wanted to nitpick all those examples
Cantonese is not a dialect of Madarin. It’s a distinct language, just a smaller one.
Standard Arabic is not actually spoken anywhere, and is primarily a written form. Egyptian pronunciations ARE commonly taught, not only because Egypt is big but because, with Egypt’s large entertainment sector, they have exported their pronunciations around the world in TV and movies.
British English is taught largely as a colonial legacy, not because England predates the US and Australia in history and is therefore considered “standard.”
While all of these secondary examples are flawed, IMO, I believe you’re actually right about Castilian Spanish. It’s simply more of an individual case than part of a common pattern.
Mandarin and Cantonese are essentially two different languages that happen to share the same characters. Someone from Honduras would be able to understand 99.9% of what a Spaniard says. If you only speak Mandarin you wouldn’t be able to understand Cantonese at all.
Can confirm, I am learning Mandarin but every time I hear Cantonese I can barely make heads or tails of it.
It’s wild when you look into how many different languages are “Chinese”. It’s like if someone were to say that someone from Germany spoke “European”.
In contrast though, I’m close to native in German, yet have a hard time with Austro-Bavarian dialects and can’t understand Schwiizerdütsch at all. The amount of times I have to say “Hochdeutsch, bitte…”
Oida
Having learned a language where dialect often means you can barely understand each other if at all, I’m more inclined to consider Mexican vs Castilian an accent much the same way as English’s American vs Australian/british/etc…
Fun fact: Mexican Spanish is derived from Castilian Spanish from the central and northern regions of Spain, and was later influenced by Indigenous, African and Caribbean languages.
It doesn’t change what you said, I just think it’s a cool fact. :D
But why?
I’d think in all of those cases it should be the variant that has the greatest population or proximity.
Formality and standardized grammar.
At some point, when you’re involving teaching a language to a class, you need a systematic way of doing so.
Typically, that means going with dictionaries and that in turn is likely to be the most formal version of a language’s pronunciation. And, with grammar, you start with the simplest but also most standardized, codified version because that’s what the books are going to use.
You don’t worry about idiom and dialect until you’ve got a fairly good grasp of the formal. Since Castilian Spanish is more or less the oldest formal Spanish, we end up learning that first.
Like, I suck at learning languages. But I tried several. One of those was Spanish. School Spanish is kinda like school English, it’s taught in strict way. Vocabulary with pronunciation, grammar rules, verb conjugation. Conversationsal Spanish just isn’t what most schools are going to start with. One could argue whether or not that’s the best place to start or not, but it is the way most languages get taught.
I dated a girl from Mexico City during that time, and she said the books were essentially the same there at least.
a couple reasons I can think of:
- choosing which dialects are taught where would be messy and complicated
- it would make producing and distributing textbooks and other learning materials more complicated and expensive
I don’t know what you mean by “choosing a dialect would be messy and complicated” since Mexican Spanish is an obvious choice. The rest of Latin America understands Mexican Spanish well because they grew up watching our shows, listening to our music and watching movies with Mexican dubs. I’ve met at least one Uruguayan, Argentinian, and a Peruvian who told me so. Don’t you think its widespread would make the choice easier?
And how do you mean it’d be more complicated and expensive? The learning materials are already made and widely used. I think it’d be a licensing issue at worst if they really wanted to switch over.
Good points.
Still at such an early level I’m not sure the distinction will be apparent or meaningful. Might be like learning German. Why pick a Hannover style of speaking over Bavarian so early?
That said I do think Mexican Spanish is more neutral in accent and cadence.
Also please enjoy this.
What state are you from? In California, we learned Mexican Spanish. My teachers very briefly mentioned vos/vosotros, but we never spent any time on those conjugations and were never tested on them.
Although… now that you mention it… maybe the textbook was for Iberian Spanish… I definitely remember the teacher going over vocabulary, getting to the word “coger”, and then 90% of the class busting up laughing, while the other 10% was confused! 😂
Maybe we did have Iberian Spanish textbooks, but since most people in my town were Mexican, we learned Mexican Spanish from the teacher using an Iberian Spanish textbook?..
I grew up in California and had the opposite experience. I had friends who grew up speaking Mexican-Spanish at home, and would take the Spanish classes to get an easy A.
The teachers never understood what the Mexican-Spanish students were saying, and kept telling the native speakers that they were doing it wrong.
I’ll be honest, I never hear anyone say vos in Spain, except an Argentinian who said it all the time and it sounded really odd
Maybe it’s because I’m from California, but we learned Mexico-Spanish. The books included Spain-Spanish (i.e. vos conjugations), but my teachers never included it in our lessons.
Kinda the same here in Nevada. Our Spanish teacher explained them briefly but told us we didn’t need to learn them, didn’t test us on them, so on.
I had a teacher from Spain for three years, then for the next four years they were from various countries: Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and the US. It was great to get used to each accent.
I learned Cuban Spanish. Upon going to Spain, I was told I spoke with the English vocabulary and accent equivalent to a southern yokel from the 1970s.
French taught on Canada (outside Quebec) is France French, not Quebec French. My source on this is that I was taught to say “we” for “oui” and not “wayh”. And the Quebec French sound I’m only getting from comediens on CBC so that could be way off.
I once stayed in a youth hostel rural Quebec and had a really weirdly hostile reception from people there, despite dredging up my very best schoolgirl French to try and make conversation. Turns out they thought I was from Ontario. When I revealed I was a Kiwi they were all suddenly very friendly. Too late!
Ouais is more like ‘yeah’, not ‘yes’.
France French people say wayh too. It’s the same difference between saying “yes” and “yeah”.
because the school system is controlled by old people and they don’t know the difference. in my high school we had Spanish teachers that were actually from Mexico and south America and they taught us useful Spanish.
I think there is a European bias and maybe a (perceived?) prestige bias to Castilian as well.
yeah, especially with the older generation (who should not legally be allowed to be administrators, if you are old enough that your brain doesn’t work anymore you can’t be trusted with authority) on top of their lack of understanding about the difference.
Mine taught Mexico Spanish, but with a brief reminder every once in a while about the vosotros conjugations.
If they would only do the same with their “English”.
We learned Mexican Spanish in my redneck school.
