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Old June 24, 2016, 12:32 AM
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Aprendo Aprendo is offline
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I've been listening to (and watching) youtube documentaries in Spanish for quite some time and listening to podcasts. My listening has improved a lot.

I am now listening to normal colloquial speaking. When people speak on the show "Caso Cerrado" for example.

I am trying to further determine and identify certain accents in Spanish by region and nationality. I now there are many countries and regions (obviously).

So I am hoping to start by only focusing on Mexico and its regions and Central Americans countries and regions.

I know there is a wide range.

I know at the moment, only the obvious differences of a couple accents: The Cubans omitting "Ss" most (all?) of the time. Argentinian. Mexican Spanish spoken more quickly and with vowel reduction; Guatemalans in general speak more slowly and it seems to pronounced their vowels more (at least when I'm listening).

I know one accent that I am hoping to ID the region and/or country, b/c I have no idea:

Example: the "b" is barely sound (or is it aspirated?). when the "b" is between to vowels.

Estaba is pronounced "estaba" but the "b" is barely pronounced and the lip barely (if at all) come together.

These same speakers also seem to reduce the "d" [th] sound when the "d" is between two vowels.

On these TV shows it is often not clear what country or region the people are from. For example on "Caso Cerrado" a wife was from Nicaragua but (I think) the husband was from Mexico. They spoke with very noticeable accents, IMO.

Anyone know of information about where to get this info?

I'd like to add that this is likely (I assume), elision. I am trying to learn more about linguistics.

Elision

In linguistics, elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a vowel, a consonant, or a whole syllable) in a word or phrase. Sometimes sounds are elided to make a word easier to pronounce. The word elision is frequently used in linguistic description of living languages, and deletion is often used in historical linguistics for a historical sound change.


Spanish

The change of Latin into the Romance languages included a significant amount of elision, especially syncope (loss of medial vowels). Spanish has these examples:

tabla from Latin tabula
isla from Latin insula (through *isula)
alma from Latin anima (with dissimilation of -nm- to -lm-)
hembra from Latin femina (with lenition of f- to h-, dissimilation of -mn- to -mr- and then epenthesis of -mr- to -mbr-'

In addition, speakers often employ crasis or elision between two words to avoid a hiatus caused by vowels: the choice of which to use depends upon whether or not the vowels are identical.[citation needed]

A frequent informal use is the elision of d in the past participle suffix -ado, pronouncing cansado as cansao. The elision of d in -ido is considered even more informal, but both elisions common in Andalusian Spanish. Thus, the Andalusian quejío for quejido (“lament”) has entered Standard Spanish as a term for a special feature of Flamenco singing. Similar distinctions are made with the words bailaor(a) and cantaor(a) as contracted versions of the literal translations for dancer and singer exclusively used for Flamenco, compared to the bailarín and cantante of standard Spanish. The perceived vulgarity of the silent d may lead to hypercorrections like *bacalado for bacalao (cod) or *Bilbado for Bilbao.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elision

Caribbean Spanish
This dialect is spoken in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and along the East coast of Mexico and Central America; it is characterized by elided middle consonants and omitted final consonants, as well as an aspirated ‘r’ that is pronounced like the Portuguese ‘x.’

Link: 10 Spanish Dialects: How Spanish is Spoken Around the World
https://www.altalang.com/beyond-word...und-the-world/

Last edited by Rusty; June 24, 2016 at 04:56 AM. Reason: merged back-to-back posts
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