Spanish accents around the world — everything you need to know

so we all know that the spanish language is a bit different from one country to the next and in this video i'm going to show you exactly how it changes with the help of some cool videos and even some internet celebrities if you're new here my name is ollie richards and this channel is all about helping you learn a new language quickly using the power of story so that you can become fluent faster and live your best life and did you know that there are at least 10 main varieties of modern spanish but it doesn't end there because mexican spanish for example has at least 10 varieties of its own so let's start at the beginning when the romans invaded the iberian peninsula in 206 bc i'm sure they had no idea that their language would just drift across the seas into so many parts of the world back then of course it was just latin but now it's french italian spanish portuguese all the romance languages so spain is where spanish was born that was medieval times though and modern spanish is just a little bit different from old spanish it picked up a whole bunch of cool words from arabic for one and the result is the beautiful language that we have today like for example the word sumo meaning fruit juice is from the arabic zoom algodon meaning cotton is from the arabic cotton actually there are a lot of words starting with al that are arabic algebra alcohol and arabic the reason is that al is actually the article in arabic because it means the even the word for crazy loko comes from an arabic word with exactly the same spelling pretty much one thing that always fascinates people about spanish is that there are just so many ways to speak it and if you've traveled much between europe and the americas then you'll know exactly what i mean it's hardly surprising with over 500 million speakers worldwide if you really want to get into the deeper mysteries of variety you'll have to do some adventurous traveling but we can check out the main ones together so let's start with spain in the 13th century a castilian king called alfonso el sabio alfonso the wise standardized the written language and that's why we call it castillano or castilian spanish and the monarchs who followed alfonso made the language official in spain now castillian spanish sounds something a little bit like this pronunciation today most spaniards speak castilian although in the south they speak another major variety andalucian which is quite different or dialectic for example in parts of andalusia they lose the so-called spanish lisp which is not actually a lisp and people from some countryside villages have a very strong accent that'd be quite hard to understand and the aseans also drop the s from a lot of words so they'll say gracia instead of gracias which gives their speech a lovely soft fluid sound here's a clip of my friend lucy who is british but learned spanish deep in the south of spain and while you're in the south if you wander into the autonomous region of murcia you might hear a unique variety called mussien or one of the toughest varieties out there one nice thing that they do is they add ico or to the end of some words kind of like how spaniards say papito when they mean papa murcianos would say papiko it just gives a more kind of endearing sound to the word i guess now in case you weren't sure there are also a few regional languages in spain like catalan galician and basque which are not varieties of spanish they are separate languages i mean try and understand not exactly spanish is it but back to the varieties here's the quirky kid of spanish genitom now this is what they speak over in gibraltar it's on the southern tip of spain but it belongs to britain actually and they speak a rather peculiar version of andalusia in spanish mixed with british english yeah british accent at all one of the odd things they do in gibraltar is they they take spanish expressions and they translate them literally into english which can sound pretty funny like the spanish phrase for example its real meaning is to stop nagging me but genitals will say in english don't give me the can the literal the don't give the literal translation don't give me the can and the easiest way to stop me from giving you the can is to hit that like button and subscribe to the channel because then i promise i'll leave you in peace no more cans now there don't seem to be any rules and each person has their own way of mixing the languages and you know why not spain only makes up 10 of the world's spanish speakers though so i'm sure you know that christopher columbus took spanish to the americas to north south central america and the caribbean but did you know it's also the official language of one african country true story let's check it out the country is equatorial guinea which is this tiny little country just north of the equator plus these five small volcanic islands the cities have beautiful spanish colonial architecture reminiscent of of colombia yet in the jungles you can see wildlife leopards gorillas chimpanzees not to mention amazing clouds of butterflies they've been speaking spanish here since colonial times and their version is like iberian spanish but with a slightly different accent and a bit of a french like sound no doubt the the many indigenous languages have also had some influence it's not easy finding speakers from equatorial guinea but here's a clip from a local movie before we leave africa i should mention another former spanish colony if you've been brave enough to explore the western sahara which is a crazy hot desert territory some countries are fighting over you may have heard spanish there although most people they speak arabic the sarabies speak spanish these guys used to be nomadic but tragically most of them are living in very harsh refugee camps now okay let's travel down to asia no don't look at me like that i know it's an unexpected place but this island nation once spoke spanish as their official language and it still lingers in their vocabulary and i'm talking about the philippines yeah in fact the spanish colonial period in the philippines lasted a lot longer than a lot of countries in latin america including mexico and if you've ever heard filipinos speaking perhaps you recognize some words like these ones that you can hear on the screen quite reminiscent of spanish i'm sure you'll agree they even have some identical sayings with spanish like masso menos more or less filipino or tagalog doesn't exactly sound spanish though if you're in the philippines and you hear a kind of spanish it's more likely to be character a spanish creole that about seven hundred thousand filipinos speak now interestingly travicano sounds more like mexican spanish with the odd word coming from native american languages how on earth because in the colonial period mexican and peruvian soldiers were brought here from the americas it's a long story but you but see how much you can understand [Music] let's get into the biggest spanish speaking territory now and one you know all about which of course latin america on this side of the world spanish is usually referred to as espanol and because it was mostly andalusians who ended up in in the americas most latin american spanish varieties are based on andalusian spanish like the use of ustedes instead of vosotros but the colonies developed somewhat independently from each other and were influenced by local tribal languages so it makes sense that latin american spanish was shaped in many unique ways i mean this is a lot of countries that we're talking about here right but by far the biggest variety is mexican spanish and no prizes this time forgetting where that is spoken mexican spanish was most strongly influenced by indigenous languages but many people say it's the easiest to understand they speak a little slower a little clearer perhaps says so maybe that's the one to go for and if you do you should check out my book 101 conversations in mexican spanish which is a packed full of outrageous mexican slang and a very cool story to boot unlike this next variety which most learners avoid and it is caribbean spanish spoken on islands like cuba puerto rico the dominican republic now caramel in spanish is known to be one of the most rapidly spoken and you have to listen carefully because they omit sounds like the d sound at the end of many words uh for example the word mitad meaning half because with that kind of very cut open sound at the end they also tend to drop the s sound at the middle and at the end of the just basically dropping stuff left right and center s but even from island to island you will hear differences apparently dominicans are the hardest to understand they cut huge chunks of a word like they'll say that instead of esta then there's the peculiar way that they that sounds a little bit french which is quite cool actually speaking of spanish islands canarian spanish from the canary islands is a variety unique to the canary islands and it's actually where i learned my spanish and although they belong to spain their language closely resembles the caribbean varieties that we were just talking about with with tons of portuguese sounding vocabulary thrown in as well no surprise there since portugal also tried to colonize the islands there's an awful lot of colonizing going on wasn't there they don't use the spanish lisp the th either nor the vosotros form of you so you should use ustedes there if you are chatting with canarians they have loads of their own phrases not heard elsewhere like very common uh expressions like menino menina it is a really appealing variety and very close to my heart as well the videos of me on this channel uh speaking canary and spanish all over the shop but let's check out the highland variety now any idea what that might be well i'm talking about andean spanish the andes mountains stretched through an amazing seven countries like peru ecuador and bolivia now if you know my story then you'll know that i almost died in my efforts to learn spanish up in the mountains on the border with bolivia not fun at all but it was a big turning point in my spanish and you can check out this video if you want to hear what that was all about have you ever done the inca trail well if you have then you'll know these guys these are the people of the andes people the andes mountains they speak with a slower much slower pace and a really kind of unique rhythm and the final letters of words are very nice and clear it's thought of as quite a conservative variety of spanish and one of the easier ones to understand in ecuador it's common to use cute diminutives like um and in peru there's lots of overlapping with indigenous languages as well so think of all these little peruvian towns on the edge of the jungle of course that means another variety which is amazonic spanish is there any ends to this i mean seriously well we haven't even gotten to the south yet this is this is a huge area and they speak rio platenses spanish now the rio de la plata runs through parts of argentina and uruguay and they share a pretty special variety of spanish one of the most unique did you know that more than 60 of argentines have italian immigrant blood and they don't just look a little different you should hear them speak spanish they have a beautiful intonation to their spanish it sounds like italian and i actually spent a lot of time in argentina myself and uh in fact i remember coming back home after four months in argentina and i picked up the accent and everything and my spanish friends just ripped me to shreds uh making fun of me for my accent argentino they used to say he's come back speaking argentine and argentinian so uh one guy at gringo my my buddy dustin lucas from the usa has adopted argentina as his spiritual home and he speaks with an incredible argentine accent check it out yes one thing that's common here is they use the word ciao to mean goodbye they rarely use the traditional hasta luego sounds pretty much like an italian influence to me one little country where you could have a really fun emotional experience is paraguay there they have two official languages spanish and guarani and most people speak both the spanish area is quite cool paraguay and spanish has unique features because they had a dictator in 1840 who sealed the borders of paraguay so they were really isolated not dissimilar to japan actually nice gaia no surprise their spanish absorbed a lot of guanani like a phrase they use when things don't look so good which means bad bad then there is chili pretty cool to have a country shaped like this don't you think one unique feature of the chilean variety is that they pronounce cha as she which makes chile get pronounced but rumor has it that chilean spanish is pretty damn difficult they have a way of leaving out letters when they speak so for example instead of saying de donderes meaning where are you from then you're going to hear something that looks a bit like this i'm not going to try and say it because i don't speak chilean spanish take that up as a challenge if you'd like to figure out what's going on there now we can't forget about central america of course this is guatemala costa rica panama nicaragua honduras and el salvador here you will hear some s sounds transformed into h sounds like the word for saint is santa right but you in this area this part of the world you might hear hunter it could take a while to figure that out quite an interesting change and costa rica has a unique way of pronouncing their r's as well actually this would be kind of tricky to copy but fun to try so the r isn't rolled like another spanish-speaking countries it's kind of a sound but they're double r's and principal rs which are normally rolled they actually do a and it's it's almost like a a z or a j almost like a jo but the tongue when it starts to roll it never quite starts the rolling so instead of going it goes and that's how they do with their double r's like if they say um uh for instance uh to run correr they would say quite nice but look to learn spanish properly you need some good material and in this video i tell you about seven spanish books that are great for beginners there's no need to struggle through don quixote or some translation of war and peace these are books that you can read and learn from even at a low level so click this video right now to see what i recommend for you

Channel: Olly Richards

Views: 378,193

Keywords: language learning, how to learn a language, foreign languages, learn a language, learn languages, polyglot, learn a new language

Id: MFYiRPkPbGs

Length: 16min 31sec (991 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021