There are a series of significant differences in the way the Spanish language is spoken in the 20 or so countries and territories where it is an official language. The Spanish language uses determiners in a similar way to English. ... The Spanish language has nouns that express concrete objects, groups and classes of objects, qualities, feelings and other abstractions. ... The Spanish language has a range of pronouns that in some ways work quite differently from English ones. ... The Spanish language uses adjectives in a similar way to English and most other Indo-European languages. ... The Spanish language has a relatively large amount of prepositions. ... Spanish verbs are one of the most complex areas of Spanish grammar. ... Main article: Spanish verbs This is a paradigm of Spanish verbs, that is, a set of conjugation tables, for the model regular verbs and for some of the most common irregular verbs (see the article on Spanish irregular verbs for common patterns of irregularity that may help understanding this paradigm). ... Spanish verbs are a complex area of Spanish grammar, with many combinations of tenses, aspects and moods (up to fifty conjugated forms per verb). ... The International Phonetic Alphabet. ... Phonetic (pho-NET-ic) is a nationwide voicemail-to-text messaging service available for most digital mobile phones in which a subscriber is provided a custom voice mailbox for the purpose of receiving all incoming voice messages as actual transcribed text for reading via short messaging (also known as SMS... In computing, Unicode provides an international standard which has the goal of providing the means to encode the text of every document people want to store on computers. ... This article is about the international language known as Spanish. ...

Pronunciation

The letters s, c (before e and i), z and x

Within Spain one can roughly distinguish between the standard Castilian and the Andalusian dialects of Castilian Spanish. The first Spaniards to settle in the Americas, mostly Andalusians, brought some of their regionalisms with them. Today distinct accents are found in the different nations of the Americas. Typical of Latin America is seseo. The modern European Castilian phoneme IPA /θ/ as in ciento, caza (interdental voiceless fricative, like English th in thin) does not exist in American Spanish; it combined with /s/ as in siento, casa. The Andalusian dialects (also called Andaluz) of European Spanish are spoken in Andalusia. ... The Americas (sometimes referred to as America) is the area including the land mass located between the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean, generally divided into North America and South America. ... There are a series of significant differences in the way the Spanish language is spoken in the 20 or so countries and territories where it is an official language. ... The International Phonetic Alphabet. ...

Since some words would become homonyms in Latin America with the confusion of the pronunciation of z or c before e or i and the s, it is preferred to use instead synonyms or slightly different words. E.g., caza l(hunting) and casa (house) become homonyms, as cocer (to boil) and coser (to sew). So, in Latin America they use instead mostly cacería (hunting expedition) and cocinar (which means "to cook" in other dialects). Homonyms (in Greek homoios = identical and onoma = name) are words which have the same form (orthographic/phonetic) but unrelated meaning. ... Synonyms (in ancient Greek syn συν = plus and onoma όνομα = name) are different words with similar or identical meanings. ... Homonyms (in Greek homoios = identical and onoma = name) are words which have the same form (orthographic/phonetic) but unrelated meaning. ...

The most distinctive feature of the Spanish variants is the pronunciation of the s. In Northern and Central Spain and Antioquia, Colombia it is apico-alveolar; in Southern Spain and most of Latin America it is alveolar or dental. In most of Latin America, except Mexico, Andean Colombia, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Andean Venezuela, Quito (and most of highland Ecuador) and highland Bolivia, the s in the end of a syllable is pronounced as an aspiration (a voiceless glottal fricative, /h/), or even in rapid speech in some variants is not pronounced at all. For instance, todos los cisnes son blancos ("all the swans are white"), can be pronounced as todoh loh cihneh son blancoh, where the h represents an aspiration, or even todo lo cine son blanco. In parts of Andalusia, the distinction between syllables with silent s and those without s is preserved by pronouncing the syllables ending in s with open vowels. The voiceless glottal fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. ... An open vowel is a vowel sound of a type used in most spoken languages. ...

The pronunciation of the letter x in Spain is just like their (apico-alveolar) s; In Latin America is pronounced as ks, with their alveolar or dental s; e.g., excelente is pronounced in Northern and Central Spain as "eSθelente" , where S represents the apico-alveoral s, but as "ekselente" by the rest. "Ascensión" is pronounced in Spain as aSθenSión, while in Latin America is pronounced just asensión.

Since Ladino speakers left Spain in the 15th century, they have preserved the old sibilants. This article deals with the Judaeo-Spanish language. ...

See also ceceo. Ceceo is a phenomenon in the Spanish language whereby the voiceless interdental fricative (International Phonetic Alphabet , the th in think) is used in place of the voiceless dental fricative . ...

The y and the ll

Traditionally Spanish had a phoneme /ʎ/, a palatal lateral, written ll. This was lost in most of the Americas (with the exception of bilingual areas where Quechua and other indigenous languages that have this sound in their inventories are spoken), but now it is also being lost in Spain (also with the exception of bilingual areas of Catalan and other languages that have preserved this sound in their inventories). In many Spanish-speaking regions, the palatal lateral /ʎ/ has merged with the palatal fricative /ʝ/ (usually written y), and this merged phoneme is pronounced in a variety of ways. This phenomenon is called yeísmo. In most of the area where yeísmo is present, the phoneme is pronounced just as /ʝ/. In the area around the Río de la Plata (Argentina, Uruguay) this phoneme is pronounced as a postalveolar fricative, voiceless or weakly voiced (similar to /ʃ/ or /ʒ/). Quechua (Standard Quechua, Runasimi Language of People) is an Native American language of South America. ... Catalan or Valencian (Català, Valencià) is a Romance language understood by as many as 12 million people in portions of Spain, France, Andorra and Italy, although the majority of active Catalan speakers are in Spain. ... Yeísmo is a distinctive feature of many dialects of the Spanish language, which consists of the merger of the palatal lateral approximant phoneme (written ll) with another phoneme, usually realized as a palatal fricative or affricate. ... A satellite view of the estuary Another satellite view of the estuary The River Plate (Spanish: Río de la Plata) is the estuary formed from the combination of the Uruguay River and the Parana River. ...

Sets of variants

In a broad sense, the Latin American Spanish could be grouped in five sets of variants, according to the pronunciation. The first group, the Caribbean is spoken in Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Venezuela (the Caribbean part, which is the principal part of the country), the Colombian Caribbean and Panamá. The second one is the South American Pacific, which comprises Perú, Chile and Guayaquil, Ecuador. The third is the Central American (just Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador). The fourth is the Argentinian-Uruguayan-Paraguayan, which probably includes the Santa Cruz de Bolivia variant. The fifth, which probably is not a group, but a cluster of places that resisted changes in the pronunciation of the s sound in the end of a syllabe, has been called the Highland Latin American Spanish, and is spoken in México, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Andean Colombia, Andean Venezuela, Quito, and Bolivia (except in Santa Cruz).

Spanish sound library

Grammatical differences

Second person singular

Most Spanish dialects have two second person singular pronouns, one for informal use and one for more formal treatment. In most dialects the informal pronoun is tú, which comes directly from the Latin, and the formal pronoun is usted, which was originally "vuestra merced", meaning "Your (plural) grace". In a number of regions tú is replaced by another pronoun, vos, and the verb conjugation changes accordingly (see details below). "Vos" comes from Latin vos, which was simply the 2nd person plural informal pronoun.

In any case, there is wide variation as when each pronoun (formal or informal) is to be used. In Spain, tú is informal (for example, used with friends) and usted is formal (for example, used with older people). In several countries, however, the formal usted is used to denote a closer personal relationship. Some Chileans, for instance, not only employ usted to address from child to parent, but also from parent to child. In Ecuador and Colombia usted is used among close friends, and many times even between couples. Some countries like Cuba privilege the use of tú even in very formal circumstances and usted thus remains seldom used. Meanwhile, in other countries, the formal vs. informal use of second-person pronouns are used to denote authority. In Peru, for example, senior military officers will use tú to speak to their subordinates, while junior officers will only use usted to address their superior officers.

Using tú informally, especially in contexts where usted was to be expected, is called tuteo. The corresponding verb is tutear (a transitive verb, the direct object being the person addressed with the pronoun). Tutear is used even in those dialects where the informal pronoun is vos.

The use of vos instead of tú is called voseo. Voseo is informal in most countries. In Argentina and Uruguay it is the standard form of the informal second person singular, and is used by all to address others in all kinds of contexts, often regardless of social status or age, including by cultivated speakers and writers, in television, publicity, and even in translations from other languages. In Uruguay vos and tú are used concurrently, though vos is much more commonplace. In both cases the verb is conjugated as vos ("Vos querés / Tú querés", rather than "Vos querés / Tú quieres"). A movie poster in Buenos Aires shows usage of vos. ...

The name Rioplatense is applied to the particular dialect, spoken around the mouth of the River Plate (Río de la Plata) and the lower course of the Paraná river, where vos is always used, with verb conjugations that resemble those of the Castilian second person plural. This area comprises the most populated part of Argentina (the provinces of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe) as well as an important part of Uruguay including Montevideo, the capital.

In Ecuador, Vos is also the most prominent form throughout the country, though it does coexists with usted and the lesser used tú. Vos is regarded as the unofficial standard, but it is not used in public discourse, the media or television. To make things more complex, in Ecuador the choice of prounoun to be used depends on the participants' likeness in age and/or social status. Based on these factors, the addresser can assess himself as being an equal, superior or inferior to the addressee, and the appropriate choice of pronoun to be employed can then be made. Ecuadorians generally use vos among familiarized equals, or by superiors [in both social status and age] to inferiors; tú among unfamiliarized equals, or by a superior in age but inferior in social status; and usted by both familiarized and unfamiliarized inferiors, or by a superior in social status but inferior in age.

Vos can be heard throughout most of Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, and a small part of Peru, but in these places it is reproched as sub-standard and the speech of the uneducated and ignorant. It is also used as the unofficial standard in the Department of Antioquia (Colombia), in Maracaibo (Venezuela), in Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and the State of Chiapas in Mexico.

A usage similar to voseo is vos with the verb in the grammatically plural form (as if it used vosotros). It appears as a formal or disrespectfully familiar use in the works of the Spanish Golden Century and period works placed in that era. The siglo de oro (a Spanish-language phrase meaning golden century) was to the great age of Spanish wealth and power, roughly from the early-to-mid-16th century to the early-to-mid-17th century. ...

In Colombia, the choice of second person singular varies with location. In most of inland Colombia (chiefly the Andean region), usted is the pronoun of choice for all situations, even in speaking between friends or family, but in large cities (Bogotá mainly), the use of tú is becoming more accepted in informal situations, especially between young interlocutors of the opposite sex (i.e., a young man talking to a young woman) and among young women. In Valle del Cauca (Cali) Antioquia (Medellín) and the Pacific coast, the pronouns used are vos/usted. In the Caribbean coast (mainly Barranquilla and Cartagena), tú is used for practically all informal situations and many formal situations, usted being reserved for the most formal environments. A peculiarity occurs in Boyacá and among older speakers in Bogotá: Usted is replaced by sumercé for formal situations (it is relatively easy to spot a Boyacense by his/her use of this pronoun). Sumercé comes from "Su Merced", an early formal pronoun. This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Valle del Cauca is a department of Colombia. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Motto: Capital Medellín Governor Area 63,612 km² Population  - Total (2003)  - Density   5,750,478 90 people/km² Adjective antioqueño Antioquia was one of the states in the original United States of Colombia, and is now a department in the northwest part of the Republic of Colombia. ... Medellin Skyline. ... The Pacific Ocean (from the Latin name Mare Pacificum, peaceful sea, bestowed upon it by the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan) is the worlds largest body of water. ... Map of Central America and the Caribbean The Caribbean Sea is a tropical body of water adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean and southeast of the Gulf of Mexico. ... A Colombian fisherman casts his line as the sun sets near Barranquilla, Colombia Panoramic view Barranquilla is the major industrial city on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. ... For other places of the same name, see Cartagena Bocagrande Cartagena San Pedro Square,Old City Cartagena Cartagena, Colombia, also known as Cartagena de Indias, is a large seaport on the north coast of Colombia. ... Motto: Capital Tunja Governor Area 23,189 km² Population  - Total (2003)  - Density   1,411,239 61 people/km² Adjective Boyacá is a department of Colombia, one of the original nine states of the United States of Colombia. Boyacá is centrally located within Colombia, almost entirely within the mountains of Eastern...

In parts of Spain, fifty years ago a child would not use tú but usted to address a parent. This would be very unusual today. Among the factors for the ongoing substitution, there are the new social relevance of youth and reduction of social differences. Being addressed as usted makes one feel older. It has also been attributed to the egalitarianism of the right-wing party Falange. On the contrary, Spanish leftists of the early 20th century would address their comrades as usted as a show of respect and worker's dignity. The Falange (or Phalange) is the name assigned to several political movements and parties dating from the 1930s, most particularly the original movement in Spain. ...

Joan Corominas explains that vos was a peasant form in classical Castilian, and since most Spanish immigrants to the New World belonged to this class, vos became the unmarked form.

Another explanation is that in Spain, although "vos" denoted high social status by those who were addressed as such (monarchs, nobility, etc.) these people never actually used the pronoun themselves since there weren't any people above them in society. Those who used "Vos" were the inferiors (lower classes and peasants). When the waves of Spanish immigrants arrived to populate the New World, they were primarily comprised of these lower classes and peasants. These would then want to raise their social status from what it was in Spain and would demand to be addressed as a "vos". Everyone thus became a "vos" in the Americas, and the pronoun was transformed into not only indicator of low status for the addresser, but also for the addressee. Conversely, in Spain today "vos" is still considered a highly exalted archaism that is confined to liturgy, and its use by native Spaniards is seen as deliberate archaism.

Other less frequent forms analogous to usted are voacé, bosanzé and boxanxé (by Moriscos), vuecencia, usía. Morisco (Spanish Moor-like) or mourisco (Portuguese) is a term referring to a kind of New Christian in Spain and Portugal. ...

Second person plural

In Standard European Spanish the plural of tú is vosotros and the plural of usted is ustedes. In Latin America vosotros is not used, and the plural of both tú and usted is ustedes. This means that speaking to a group of friends a Spaniard will use vosotros and a Latin American will use ustedes. The verb conjugation for ustedes employs a grammatically third person plural form (even though ustedes is semantically second person). The only rest of vosotros in America is boso/bosonan in Papiamento. Joan Corominas supposes that the vos forms in the Caribbean were perceived as slave-talk, and disrespectful for, initially, whites and later for everybody. Papiamento or Papiamentu is a Creole language and it is the primary language spoken on the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Curaçao, and Bonaire. ...

The plural of the Colombian Sumercé is Sumercés, from Sus Mercedes.

In some parts of Andalusia, the use is what they call ustedes-vosotros: ustedes is combined with the verbal forms for vosotros.

Second Person Verb Conjugation

Changes in the pronoun also bring along a change in the second person of the verb. Roughly a third of Latin American speakers of Spanish replace the singular pronoun Tú by Vos. This also affects verb conjugations, which are replaced by forms related with the plural vosotros, either without the diphthongization of those forms or without the final s. This originated because an influence of French (where even if the singular 2nd person is Tu, when talking to someone with respect Vous [2nd person plural] is used). When irregular verbs are observed it is obvious that vos conjugations are related to the vosotros forms. Vosotros and the French vous autres ("you others") were the informal 2nd person plural in the old days, distinct from their respective formal conjugation : "vos" and "vous". In France, "vous" is now both formal 2nd person singular and informal 2nd person plural; in Québec (Canada), it is not uncommon to also hear "vous autres", which is as odd to a Frenchman to hear as "Thou" for an anglophone. Examples:

• 'You speak'

Spain Spanish singular - tú hablas

Argentina and Central America - vos hablás

Uruguay - vos hablás, tú hablás

Chile - tú hablái, vos hablái

Colombia - usted habla, tú hablas, sumercé habla

Venezuela (Maracaibo) and archaic Spanish formal singular - vos habláis

Ecuador - vos hablas, vos hablás, vos habláis

Spain Spanish plural - vosotros habláis

• 'That you lose' (perder is a semi-regular verb, with vowel alternation according to stress position)

Spain Spanish singular - que tú pierdas

Argentina and Ecuador - que vos pierdas

Uruguay - que vos pierdas, que tú pierdas

Central America - que vos perdás

Chile - que tú perdái, que vos perdái

Colombia - que usted pierda, que tú pierdas, que sumercé pierda

Venezuela(Maracaibo) and archaic Spanish formal singular: que vos perdáis

Spain Spanish plural - que vosotros perdáis

• 'Come'

Spain Spanish singular- ven tú

Argentina, Central America, Venezuela (Maracaibo) - vení vos

Ecuador - vení vos, ven vos

Chile - ven tú, ven vos

Colombia - venga usted, ven tú, venga sumercé

Spain Spanish plural - venid vosotros

The term voseo also applies when a pronoun other than Vos is used but the verb immediately following is nonetheless conjugated according to the norms of Vos: hence "Tú subís, Tú decís, Tú querés" is still considered voseo.

Verb tenses

Spanish has two ways to express an action finished in the past: the simple past called pretérito indefinido, and the compound tense called pasado perfecto. In Spain and many other places, the compound tense is preferred in most cases:

• Yo he viajado a los Estados Unidos. "I have travelled to the USA."
• Cuando he llegado, la he visto. "When I have come, I have seen her."

However, in other dialects the simple past tense is preferred:

• Viajé a Estados Unidos. "I travelled to the USA."
• Cuando llegué, la vi. "When I came, I saw her."

In Argentina, the compound past tense is used rarely, most notably when the action has been finished recently, to stress its immediacy, much like the present perfect in English, but even in those cases the simple past tense is prevalent.

• ¿Dónde estuviste? "Where were you?"

In this dialect, the first example of the compound past given above (Yo he viajado...) is grammatical, though it sounds affected or foreign. The second example (Cuando he llegado), however, would be considered grammatically incorrect due to the presence of the compound tense in the clause started by cuando ("when").

Evolution

The Swedish Hispanist Bertil Malmberg holds that there is a tendency in the evolution of Spanish to prefer syllables that end in vowels. In variants like that of Argentine gauchos, that were less subject to the standard, this leads to a weakening of final consonants like /l/, /r/ or /s/. The change of syllable-final /s/ to a barely audible /h/ or simply nothing is rather noticeable in many dialects including the Argentine ones. In the Castilian variety, this tendency exists but is less marked. Gauchos and chinas dancing A gaucho is a South American cattle herder, the equivalent to the North American cowboy in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and (with the spelling gaúcho) southern Brazil, and formerly the Falkland Islands. ...

However, Malmberg and others have pointed out that in the Spanish of Mexico, it is vowels which lose strength, while consonants are fully pronounced. Malmberg explains this by the influence of the consonant-complex Nahuatl language through bilingual speakers and placenames. Others have pointed out that Mexican Spanish is tending towards stress timing and concomitant vowel reduction, and that this is likely to be caused by the influence of geographically close English of the United States and economic and social-cultural ties between the two countries. Nahuatl is a term applied to some members of the Aztecan or Nahuan sub-branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. ... Timing, in linguistics, refers to the rhythmic qualities of speech in a given language, in particular how syllables are distributed across time. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... American English (AmE) is the form of the English language used mostly in the United States of America. ...

Mutual comprehension

The different dialects and accents do not severely 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. (Disney Pictures used educated Puerto Rican speakers). Currently, non-Spanish (usually Hollywood) productions are dubbed separately into each of the major accents, but productions from another Spanish-language country are never dubbed. The popularity of telenovelas and Latin American music familiarize the speakers with other varieties of Spanish. A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος, dialektos) is a variety of a language used by people from a particular geographic area. ... Accents mark speakers as a member of a group by their pronunciation of the standard language. ... In linguistics, a basilect is a term for dialects of speech which have diverged so far from the standard language that in essence they have become a different language. ... A sound film (or talkie) is a motion picture with synchronized sound, as opposed to a silent movie. ... In filmmaking, dubbing refers to the recording of voices for a movie. ... Walt Disney Pictures is a United States-based movie studio, and is a division of The Walt Disney Company. ... ... Telenovela is the Spanish and Portuguese word for prime time serial or soap opera. ... Latin American music, or the music of Latin America, is sometimes called Latin music. ...

Selected list of Spanish dialects and varieties

• Spanish of Mexico
• Spanish of the Río de la Plata region
• Spanish of Puerto Rico
• Spanish of Panama
• Spanish in the United States
• Spanish in the Philippines
• The Ladino language of Jews

Mexican Spanish is the form or dialect of the Spanish spoken in Mexico, by over 90% of the Mexican population. ... Rioplatense Spanish (castellano rioplatense) is a dialect of the Spanish language which is completely spoken around the Río de la Plata basin, in whole Argentina and whole Uruguay. ... Puerto Rican Spanish is a Spanish dialect spoken in Puerto Rico and by people of Puerto Rican descent elsewhere. ... Panamanian Spanish is the variant of the Spanish language most prevalent in the Central American country, Panama. ... Spanish is the second most common language in the United States, after English, being spoken natively by about 30 million people 5 years and over (or 12% of the population) in 2005 excluding 4. ... Spanish is a language of historical and cultural significance in the Philippines. ... This article deals with the Judaeo-Spanish language. ...

See also

• Spelling reform of the Spanish language
• List of phonetics topics