Venezuelan Spanish - Dialectal Features

Dialectal Features

• Venezuelan Spanish often shortens words, for example, changing para ("for") into pa. In addition, /d/ between vowels is often dropped (elision): helado ("ice cream") becomes . Originally from southern Spain and the Canary Islands, these traits are common to many other Spanish variations.
• Another common feature is the debuccalization of syllable-final /s/, whereby adiós ("goodbye") becomes . Common to most coastal areas in America, the Canary Islands, and the southern half of Spain.
• Syllable-final /n/-velarisation, or /n/-assimilation: ambientación ("atmosphere") becomes either or .
• As in most American dialects, also, Venezuelan Spanish has yeísmo (a merger of /ʎ/ and /ʝ/), and seseo (traditional /θ/ merges with /s/). That is, calló ("s/he became silent") and cayó ("s/he fell") are homophones, and casa ("house") is homophonous with caza ("hunt"). Seseo is common to all of America, the Canary Islands, and southern Spain, and yeísmo is prevalent in most Spanish variations.
• The phoneme /x/ is realized as glottal in Caribbean coast of Venezuela, in common with the pronunciation of El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia, Spanish Caribbean islands, Canary Islands, and southern Spain.
• A characteristic common to the Venezuelan, Dominican, Cuban and Costa Rican dialects is the use of the diminutive -ico and -ica instead of the standard -ito and -ita, restricted to words with -t in the last syllable; for example, rata ("rat") becomes ratica ("little rat").
• The second-person singular informal pronoun is usually tú, as in most of Latin America and also in Spain. This practice is referred to as tuteo. However, in Zulia and some parts of Falcón and Trujillo, it is common to find voseo, that is, the use of vos instead of tú. This phenomenon is present in many other Latin American dialects (notably Rioplatense), but Zulian voseo is diptongado, that is, the conjugation preserves the diphthongs of the historical vos conjugation that have been monophthongized in Rioplatense (which means the Zulian forms are the same as those used in Spanish from Spain for the second person plural vosotros): instead of tú eres, tú estás, Zulian says vos sois, vos estáis (compare with plural forms in Spanish from Spain vosotros sois, vosotros estáis; and with Rioplatense forms vos sos, vos estás). Another exception to the tuteo of Venezuelan Spanish is the use of the second-person singular formal pronoun Usted interchangeably with tú, a practice that is unique to the states of Mérida and Táchira. In general, the plural form of the second person is "ustedes" instead of "vosotros".
• The word vaina is used with a variety of meanings (such as "shame", "thing or topic", "pity", and many others) and often as an interjection or a nonsensical filler.
• Venezuelan Spanish has a lot of Italianisms, Galicisms and Anglicisms.