Talk:Spanish dialects and varieties

message: Would there be any interest in dividing regions into broad zones like the zona castellana, zona alteña, and zona bajeña with descriptions of linguistic variance?-Flaquito (talk) 04:35, 21 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you mean reorganizing the data to fit into regions or do you mean adding a section describing the regions of dialect groups? — Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 17:28, 21 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I was thinking reorganizing the data to fit into the three main groups and then subdividing each group for the various regionalisms. There seems to be a lot of literature that supports such broad categorization.-Flaquito (talk) 04:27, 22 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Geographical dialectology/geolects

message: On the article, it says that Andalusians were the first to go to the Americas and influenced the sound of "z" and "c before e and i" , but, in fact, Old Spanish was still spoken then, and the sounds for z was /ds/ and c before i and e was /ts/, and /θ/ was not a sound yet. Shouldn't this be fixed? ₭øμt̪ũ 02:56, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: According to our article on ceceo, the dialectal divide between what is now Castilian and what is now Andalusian existed even in 15th century Spanish where they differed in the place of articulation for dental affricates.  The /s/ pronunciation of z and soft c has its roots in this difference, so that in itself doesn't rule out the statement.  — Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 01:19, 10 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Distinción vs. seseo/ceceo incorrectness

message: Ok, I'm not going to start an edit war for this article, but many changes I made recently have been reverted.  In the interest of harmony, I won't re-edit the piece, but I have to say that the tone of the article is completely misleading.  The language properly called Spanish may have many regional variations in accent, and variations in local words for everyday things, as all languages do, but there are no "dialects" of the sort implied by this article.  What the hell does it mean to say "there is a gap" between the Spanish in Spain and that in Latin America?  As a native Spanish speaker from Puerto Rico who has traveled extensively in Latin America AND Spain, I can tell you it's the same freaking language!  I have no trouble whatsoever conversing in Spain (or anywhere else Spanish is spoken).  The Spaniards may at times sound quaint to me, with their "ceseo" and occasional use of the "vos" forms, but those TRIVIAL differences not only do not impede comprehension, they are forms of speech well known in all Spanish-speaking countries, and occasionally, if even for fun, used just about anywhere you go in Spanish society.  The "vos" constructions were taught in my grammar school classes in Spanish grammar as just another variety in the richness of the language.  It was noted by the teachers that it is not in common use in Puerto Rico, and more used in other countries, but it is part of the Spanish language and known by all.  Similarly the "ceseo" doesn't make a dialect, and in fact, is occasionally used in Puerto Rico for emphasis or in a jocular vein when "putting on airs."  
This article implies that the Spanish language is replete with "dialects" characterized by mutually incomprehensible gibberish which will make  a person from Uruguay, for example, unintelligible to someone from Spain.  No mention is made of the Real Academia.  Articles like this are the genesis of the misunderstanding non-Spanish speakers have about this language.  I live in the "upper 48" United States, and I've had people actually argue with me, trying to tell me that I can't be understood, nor can I understand, people from Spain or Cuba.  It's arrant, ignorant nonsense.  Wikipedia would be an excellent forum to address these issues of misunderstanding; instead, it's stoking the fires of ignorance.74.239.2.104 (talk) 16:15, 12 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The two preceding comments—respectively from "74.239.2.104" at 16:15, 12 October 2009 and from "166.147.108.7" at 08:31, 13 June 2013—seem to be based on an assumption that the term "dialects" implies lack of mutual intelligibility. But, on the contrary, definitions of "dialect" in reference works such as The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics (P. H. Matthews) or A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (David Crystal)—as well as Wikipedia's own article "Dialect"—refer to the well-known principle that different dialects of the same language generally are considered to be mutually intelligible. The Wiki article does mention two distinct uses of the term: one—common among linguists and presumably the one used in this article—refers to any distinctive variety of a language, while the other refers to a "a language that is socially subordinated to a regional or national standard language". If this latter use of the term attaches a stigma to it, that is an issue separate from the matter of mutual intelligibility, and it would need to be addressed throughout the article and even in its title. Kotabatubara (talk) 03:00, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Dialects" 

message: To amplify on my above post, I notice that the article on "English Dialects" seems to imply that English speakers enjoy a mutual comprehension not present in other languages, and that the varieties of English differ only slightly. As a fluent English speaker who has traveled extensively in England and Scotland, as well as the United States and Canada, I can attest to the misleading nature of that contention.  I am a native Spanish speaker, born and raised in Puerto Rico.  I know from experience that the difference between Spanish as spoken in Puerto Rico and Spanish spoken in any other Caribbean or South American country, or in Spain, is minimal.  I have traveled also extensively in Central and South America, and have been in Spain numerous times.  The language is virtually identical, the differences are trivial and in no way impede comprehension.  However, if you travel throughout England, you will be stupefied by the difference in the spoken English language just within that country.  There is no problem for a person educated in standard American English understanding English spoken with the recieved pronunciation of, for example "BBC English."  You can converse just about anywhere in London, as long as it's a "nice" area.  Just try, though, to speak to someone with a Cockney accent.  It's another freakin' tongue!  Seriously, it's well nigh incomprehensible.  In Scotland, once again, as long as you are in Edinburgh or Glasgow you can get along famously, but head out to the country, and you almost need an interpreter (or a Scot with monumental patience).  The variability between those spoken English dialects (inside one country!)is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more pronounced, and impede comprehension much more, than any variety of Spanish spoken throughout the world.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.239.2.104 (talk) 15:00, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Provide documentation for the anecdotal evidence, and you are welcomed to make changes.---Flaquito (talk) 01:57, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  More on "Dialects" 

message: My contentions, which are not "anecdotes," are provided on the basis of my personal experience with the language.  My experience with the language, which I share with all Spanish speakers, is in itself a form of documentation, since the degree of comprehension between variations in a language can only be ascertained by the assertions of those who speak the language.  I understand that an entry in an encyclopedia article requires documentation of purported facts, but we are not talking of stating the molecular weight of unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine, or the population of Mukden, Manchuria, that is, independent quantifiable entities.  We are rather discussing how well a Spanish speaker from one particular region or country can understand a Spanish speaker from another region.  There is no quantification of this.  Linguistic analyses of phonemes, glottal stops, bi-labial fricatives and the like do not help clarify that issue.  Only the experience of native speakers does.  I am a native speaker and experience in this is, or should be, a valuable input into this subject.74.239.2.104 (talk) 19:47, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Documentation?" 

message: The article List of Spanish words having different meanings in distinct Spanish-speaking countries was recently discussed for deletion. The discussion ended with no consensus. Several editors argued that the topic is notable and that there is no reason in principal that a discriminate, well-sourced list cannot be created. On the other hand, several editors argued that a complete list would be unwieldy, making the List of... format inappropriate. Similarly, editors argued that the list is more like a directory of dictionary definitions than a glossary.
The article Spanish dialects and varieties mentions that some varieties are distinct in terms of vocabulary, but does not illustrate specific lexical differences. Merging the list of words into this article would strengthen the article and move around some of the objections to the list.
Please indicate whether you support or oppose the proposed merger, offering specific reasons. Cnilep (talk) 16:10, 22 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merger discussion 

message: With regard to the vowel reduction of central Mexico, I have deleted the statements that attempted to attribute it to English influence, mainly for two reasons: (1) The Mexican vowel reduction that I have witnessed and read about in linguistic literature involves mainly the loss of voicing (vocal cord vibration), while English vowel reduction involves neutralization of height, roundness, etc. in schwa; they are phonetically different. The Mexican reduction is more like that of Japanese than of English (see the section "Devoicing" in Japanese phonology). (2) Mexican vowel reduction is usually associated with "central" Mexico; it is not a particularly U.S. border phenomenon. Kotabatubara (talk) 03:22, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Vowel reduction

message: I deleted the brief section "Evolution" for the following reasons: (1) "Evolution" is a broad term; we assume all dialectal differences came about through evolution. (2) The section seemed to be only about the weakening of syllable codas, with just an allusion to /l/ and /r/ and a not-very-specific statement about the debuccalization of coda /s/. Debuccalization is treated fully elsewhere in the article, making this section redundant. (3) The relative instability of syllable codas compared to onsets is not unique to Spanish; in fact, it could be seen as one of those truisms that are sometimes called "boring universals" in linguistics. It was not a bold discovery by Malmberg. By the way, there are two Bertil Malmbergs. The linguist Bertil Malmberg (1913-1994) is found only in the Swedish Wikipedia; there is no Wikipedia article about him in English. Meanwhile the poet and actor (1889-1958) by the same name appears both in English and in Swedish. Kotabatubara (talk) 04:45, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Evolution 

message: There seems to be a misunderstanding abot the sentence El año pasado he viajado a España. This sentence is basicly ungrammatical for most Spanish speakers, both in America and in Spain. As other ungrammatical expressions, though, it cannot be ruled out some sporadic use by natives, under certain psychological circumstances. El año pasado viajé a X is the sentence that you would expect from any illiterate person in Spain. Also, I don't like Bello's mention, as he's been pushing up daisies for some 150 years, after all. Jotamar (talk) 18:56, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I accept the "blame" for citing Bello, and I agree a fresher source would be preferable.  What's the modern counterpart, prescriptive, for the Americas?  I googled "el año pasado he" and got 317,000 hits.  Granted, about half of the first 20 are false positives (with punctuation or other clausal boundary before "he"), but there remain many instances of the compound tense with "el año pasado".  I would yield to the expertise of others on this whole verb-tense question, if it's based on good data. Kotabatubara (talk) 20:07, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  ''El año pasado he viajado a España'' 

message: There's certainly nothing wrong with using the article in "a los Estados Unidos", but that article is quickly withering away in usage, if you believe the Google Books Ngram Viewer. The no-article version surged ahead in the 1990s. Kotabatubara (talk) 17:49, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  "...a (los) Estados Unidos" 

message: I've changed the transcription of the pronunciation of standard Spanish [ˈto̞ðo̞z lo̞s ˈθizne̞s sõ̞m ˈblãŋko̞s] to [ˈto̞ðo̞s lo̞s ˈθisne̞s sõ̞m ˈblãŋko̞s] because the final -s and the medial -s- are not voiced in that context. Anyone can check that by putting his/her hand in the throat and feel the absence of vibration.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.79.146.218 (talk) 18:18, 14 June 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I reverted the above-mentioned change, restoring the [z] that had been changed to [s]. Reason: It is well established in the literature on Spanish phonology that the phoneme /s/ becomes voiced—realized as [z]—when it directly precedes a voiced consonant, as in "todos los cisnes". For example, see page 108 in Navarro Tomás, or page 81 in Barrutia and Terrell. Feeling your own throat is not a scientifically reliable indicator, since your pronunciation might be influenced by your expectations. Kotabatubara (talk) 20:15, 14 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Debuccalization of coda /s/ 

message: I've rewritten this section to focus on the vowel opening in eastern Andalusian, because that is where one dialect differs from the others with regard to the open-mid vowels. I've also given it a source citation, which it didn't have previously. The replaced text alluded to the Andalusian phenomenon in its first sentence, but the rest of the section referred to "all dialects". Phenomena that affect all dialects are not relevant to this article. Some of the replaced text's statements about the distribution of relatively open mid vowels (in all dialects) were controversial (in disagreement with, for example, Navarro Tomás, sections 52 and 59, and with D'Introno/Teso/Weston—Fonética y fonología actual del español—pp. 187 and 193)—but since the all-dialects phenomena are irrelevant to this article, this is not the place to discuss those controversies. Hualde's phonetic transcription of libro and libre puts a diacritic like an inverted T below the final o and e; I was able to duplicate it on the e, but not on the o. Kotabatubara (talk) 16:33, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: The section title is inaccurate in my opinion, what we have is a double set of vowels (open/closed or perhaps tense/lax, etc.) which some authors assign to all five vowels, not just a, e, o. However I won't change further the section until I find a source. --Jotamar (talk) 17:21, 27 October 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Open-mid vowels 

message: The sentence quoted below seems wrong. Can we have some documentation or delete it? "There is a [sic] free variation in word-initial positions [sic] (only after a pause or consonant-ending words), following l, n, or s, and in lexical derivations: [r ~ ɾ]ey, [r ~ ɾ]opa, al[r ~ ɾ]ededor, en[r ~ ɾ]iquecer, en[r ~ ɾ]ollar, hon[r ~ ɾ] a, Is[r ~ ɾ] ael, ab[r ~ ɾ]ogado, sub[r ~ ɾ]ayar, ciudad[r~ ɾ]ealeño.[citation needed]" Kotabatubara (talk) 16:06, 26 October 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I've removed the content in question. It's been uncited for more than a year and a half, so editors have had more than enough opportunity to provide documentation. — Æµ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 16:41, 26 October 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Word-initial <r>: free variation?

message: The article incorretctly uses the term "Middle America" instead of "Central America" in section 3.1.1, "Second person singular", when it says "(in parts of Middle America, especially, Costa Rica and Colombia)"  as opposed to "(in parts of"Central America, especially, Costa Rica and Colombia)". --Fandelasketchup (talk) 13:29, 7 January 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: See Middle America (Americas). — Æµ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 17:19, 7 January 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Then why do most English maps prefer the term "Central America"? --Fandelasketchup (talk) 09:59, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Because they see value in dividing the Americas up into North, South, and Central. That has no bearing on whether using a different term to refer to a different regional grouping is incorrect. It's not. It is incorrect, however, to refer to Colombia as part of Central America. — Æµ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 16:38, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Middle" America? No, sir. "Central" America 

message: It really looks almost offensive to have put Catalan on the Dialects section, I'm guessing that it refers to the Catalan characteristics in spoken Spanish, but Jesus Christ putting it the way it's put is a crime in Catalonia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by GuillemVS (talk • contribs) 19:48, 18 May 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Fixed. --Jotamar (talk) 07:10, 19 May 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Catalan "Dialect" 

message: So, we all know that the main, especially phonetic, division in Peninsular Spanish is between northern and southern varieties, and that at the same time these dialect boundaries are fuzzy at best. The thing is, right now I have two sources which give big-picture divisions of Peninsular Spanish. One, Lipski 2018, has a binary division between the southern varieties of Andalusia, Murcia and Extremadura, and northern varieties (everywhere else). The other one, from  Introducción a la lingüística hispánica , divides (monolingual) Peninsular Spanish into three regions - a conservative northern-central one north of Madrid, an intermediary area, and Andalusian. On the page Peninsular Spanish I mentioned both divisions, and the more thorough one from Lipski 2012, but I'm wondering what we should do on this page. Just mention both? Mention (what I assume to be) the principal isoglosses/criteria used in each classification? Erinius (talk) 01:47, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: What is the basis for the Lipski division? I guess it is: Avoiding confrontation with the Spanish philological establishment. Lipski is a specialist in Latin American dialects and he's also studied minority dialects and creoles in other parts of the world, I don't think he's ever researched Spain. For me, it's obvious that any dialect division that includes Madrid in North is automatically rubbish. I already told you, the sources about dialects in Spain are conditioned by the prevalent ideologies and are unreliable. --Jotamar (talk) 23:04, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: From what I can tell the closest Lipski's gotten to researching Spanish in Spain is Gibraltar, lol. Anyway, thanks for your comment, it made me think about the issue a bit more. I assume the basis for Lipski's binary classification is the handling of final consonants, which is reasonable enough. But there really is no clean division (as Lipski himself admits) and Madrid itself is pretty clearly an intermediary dialect zone - it has both the "Madriz" and "verdaz" thing shared with provinces to the north, and not just s-aspiration but the same "ejque" found in the former capital of Toledo. So it makes sense to (as the Introducción does - you can find it here and gain access through the Wikipedia Library) mention a really conservative northern region, the super-innovatory southern region of Andalusia, and an intermediate zone in between. It gives a clearer overview of the situation and has a lesser chance of misleading readers. Erinius (talk) 09:49, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

text: I should also say - the tripartite map from the Introducción looks a lot like this map, which the page already uses - and this map, which I'm pretty sure you made. Makes sense cause the isoglosses are the same. Erinius (talk) 09:58, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Divisions of Peninsular Spanish 

message: "Currently, films not originally in Spanish (usually Hollywood productions) are dubbed separately into two accents: one for Spain, except Canary Islands, and one for the Americas (using a neutral standardized accent without regionalisms); there are two accents used for the Americas: Mexican for the most of Americas and Canary Islands and Rioplatense for Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay"
This is not clear to me. Does this mean that there are a total of three accents used when dubbing a film into Spanish? Spanish, Mexican and Rioplatense? But first, it says two accents. So I am confused. @ 62.63.246.219 (talk) 20:46, 20 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: That wording was introduced recently by user:FILWISE and clearly needs a source. --Jotamar (talk) 21:37, 20 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dubbing