Spanish Language in The Americas - Main Features

Main Features

Pronunciation varies from country to country and from region to region, just as English pronunciation varies from one place to another.

• Most Spaniards pronounce /z/ and /c/ before /i/ or /e/ as, while most Latin Americans pronounce it as, the same as /s/. However, the absence of this distinction is also typical of parts of Southern Spain (notably Seville and Cádiz) and of the Canary Islands, and the predominant position of people from these areas in the conquest of and subsequent immigration to Latin America from Spain is largely the reason for the absence of this distinction in most Latin American dialects.
• As mentioned, Anglicisms are far more common in Latin America than in Spain, due to the stronger and more direct US influence.
• Equally, indigenous languages have left their mark on American Spanish, a fact which is particularly evident in vocabulary to do with flora, fauna and cultural habits.
• Doublets of Arabic-Latinate synonyms with the Arabic form are common in Latin American Spanish being influenced by Andalusian Spanish like Andalusian and Latin American alcoba. In this sense Latin American Spanish is closer to the dialects spoken in the south of Spain. Examples include standard habitación or dormitorio ('bedroom') or alhaja for standard joya ('jewel').
• See List of words having different meanings in Spain and Latin America.
• Disappearance of de which means "of" in certain expressions, as is the case with the dialect of Spanish in Canary Islands. Example: esposo Rosa instead of esposo de Rosa, gofio millo instead of gofio de millo, etc.
• American Spanish usually features yeísmo—that is, there is no distinction between /ll/ and /y/, and both are . However, Yeísmo is an expanding and now dominant feature of European Spanish, a common feature of Andalusia and Canary Islands. Speakers of Rioplatense Spanish pronounce both /ll/ and /y/ as or . The traditional pronunciation of the digraph /ll/ is preserved in some dialects along the Andes range, especially in Peru and Colombia highlands, and all Bolivia and Paraguay.
• Most speakers in coastal dialects may debuccalize syllable-final /s/ to, or drop it entirely, so that está ("s/he is") sounds like or, as in southern Spain (Andalusia, Murcia, Castile–La Mancha (except North-East), Madrid, Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla).
• The /g/ (before /e/ or /i/) and /j/ may be in inland dialects, and often firmly strong (rough) in Peru, while in Caribbean and other coastal dialects it is usually as in most southern Spanish speeches.
• In many Caribbean speeches the phonemes /l/ and /r/ at the end of a syllable sound alike or can be exchanged: caldo > cado, cardo > cado. This happens at a reduced level in Ecuador and Chile as well and is a feature brought from Extremadura and westernmost Andalusia.