Spanish Dialects and Varieties - Mutual Comprehension

Mutual Comprehension

The different dialects and accents do not block cross-understanding among the educated. The basilects have diverged more. As an example, early sound films were dubbed into one version for the entire Spanish-speaking market. Currently, non-Spanish (usually Hollywood) productions are dubbed separately into two accents: one for Spain and other for Latin America (using a Mexican or Puerto Rican accent without regionalisms), although some high-budget productions, such as the Harry Potter film series, had dubs to three or more of the major accents. On the other hand, productions from another Spanish-language country are never dubbed (the exceptions are old Spanish cartoons like Dogtanian or The World of David the Gnome which had a Mexican dub). The popularity of telenovelas and music familiarize the speakers with other accents of Spanish.

Prescription and a common cultural and literary tradition, among other factors, have contributed to the formation of a loosely-defined register which can be termed Standard Spanish (or "Neutral Spanish"), which is the preferred form in formal settings, and is considered indispensable in academic and literary writing, the media, etc. This standard tends to disregard local grammatical, phonetic and lexical peculiarities, and draws certain extra features from the commonly acknowledged canon, preserving (for example) certain verb tenses considered "bookish" or archaic in most other dialects.