On the difference of Chilean Spanish to other "dialects":
> It’s the farthest region from Spain, so the least communicated to the rest of the empire, and hence the one that drifted the most from the homeland.
Er... if you look at the table (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_...), Chile has quite a lot of red, but actually its Spanish is closer to the Spanish from Spain than that of other South American countries. So it looks like those have drifted further from "standard" Spanish, while Chile hasn't as much?
> So it looks like those have drifted further from "standard" Spanish, while Chile hasn't as much?
I think the chart is saying less about differences relative to Spanish Spanish and more about each regional dialect relative to the others.
In the table, the countries appear to be ordered (horizontally as well as vertically) by distance relative to Spain. Assuming there's nothing (like an ocean) to prevent the diffusion and evolution of language, given any cross-location in the grid, the cells nearest should theoretically have little to no gradient.
That's clearly not the case with Chile and isolation due to the Andes seems like a reasonable cause.
Colombia and Costa Rica also exhibit this effect, though, and I'm not sure why. FARC? They are separated by Panama and the PCZ; has the canal had an effect of preserving Panama's cultural ties relative to other countries at the expense of those of CO/CR?
These differences go back much further in the past, so FARC has nothing to do with it in Colombia (it’s spelled with an “o”). There’s a large linguistic diversity within these countries, which that table doesn’t reflect or account for.
Please note that there is no "standard" Spanish. In the Spain there are multitude of dialects and different variants. Even in the same region (e.g. Andalusia) you can find a ton of different variants. All of them are valid, as the RAE and the AAL make it clear.
Spanish can use four or five dialects, plus Vasque that is a totally different isolated language. But they all talk also bare metal Spanish.
Andalusians will change naturally to a more standard and fully intelligible Spanish when talking with somebody from Zaragoza (or even with Andalusian people that use a different accent). And any educated person can write fully understandable standard Spanish.
If you want to be more widely understood, it's better to sound more like the King of England than whatever your local variety is.
I tone down my (English language) accent when speaking to foreigners all the time. The point is to be understood.
I'm toning it down right now in this message. I want to be clear to a wider audience, not folksy.
So is Spain really telling other people the way they speak is "wrong", or is there simply a prestige accent, best utilised for international communication so the maximum amount of people can understand?
No, it has nothing to do with accent (phonetic). It's entirely language. They have a long history of "forbidding" words that are "real or not real spanish".
And by the way, counterintuitively, languages have NOT evolved to be better understood, but on the contrary, to "separate" or create cohesion in smaller groups.
"Spain" is not forbidding anything, the RAE [1] and the ASALE [2] are working together in keeping a common tongue. Don't allow some chauvinistic view to cloud your judgement.
There are royal academies in each Spanish speaking country. Is a very old institution that creates diplomatic links and a help net between countries on everything related with the Spanish dictionary. They solve doubts for free, or publish American Vocabulary dictionaries (so American people can understand other American people).
If you want to understand Spanish this is the best resource available
Not all people in this academy descend from the Borbons. Not all people there are from Spain. All are voted by their peers based in their perceived merits. Is a meritocracy, not a monarchy.
Some people appreciate the fact that there are experts on Spanish language trying to help everybody. Other will keep saying the equivalent to "Experts thing that are better than me" or "Death to conquerors. Mine is better, Murica!!". Everybody has their own choice, but the reward is ending with a language that nobody will understand. A very silly prize.
They have a long history of being proscriptive for anything that isn't "their real spanish" (that being of Spain). In latin america, we use a lot of neologisms ("commitear", "pushear", "mergear") and those are strictly "prohibited" by them, to the point that some spanish universities, following RAEs recommendations, fail students using them.
Any centralized institution that is in charge of overseeing a large and diverse number of countries that have evolved spanish over the past ~400 years is, in my eyes, set to fail.
Now, I do use RAE all the time to check definitions, but I see it as a "descriptive" body, in charge of creating some definitions. But even some of those definitions have to be "scrutinized" and can't be literally and blindly trusted. For example, check the definition of "gitano", which has a clear pejorative connotation. That is not wrong, is just the reality of how the "spanish speaking world" expresses itself. But should you take that definition by heart? I don't think so.
This is a clear example of "The Cathedral vs the Bazaar", as in Open Source vs privative software. I'm a hacker, I prefer a bazaar to a single institution dictating how we should talk..
You know that the RAE [1] work together with the Asociacion de Academias de la Lengua Española (ASALE) [2], right? You are showing the RAE in bad light, while both the RAE and the ASALE work together when creating new editions of the dictionary or new grammar rules.
About your "neologisms", no they are calcos or loan translations [3], they are not neologisms. They would be neologisms if they were new words, not copy of words from other languages.
Something that wasn't mentioned here before is that Chile is quite close in terms of grammar. Other South American countries supposedly have deviated more.
It's hard to understand some Chilean speakers but that's because they don't modulate their voice and cut or join words. But grammatically they are "correct".
There is a lot of Chilean slang and it's almost universally understood from north to south. But people are aware of it, it's usually not used at work. And then there are a lot of words which are just different, just about every fruit has a different name.
Orale! Was not expecting to see us New Mexicans get called out here on Hacker News, but you're not wrong. It's surprising how much variation there is despite NM being so close to Mexico.
Chilean Spanish is heavily influenced by Spanish, German, Italian, and Croat immigrants from a pronunciation and colloquialism standpoint because those were the 4 main immigrant communities to Chile.
Also, Spain Spanish is not necessarily "Standard" (Castilian) Spanish.
My opinion as Spaniard and having a chilean close, is that Chilean Spanish is the closest to mine in terms of pronunciation. And to me what makes the biggest difference is not European migration but native words.
The main influences are Mapudungun and the Andalusian accent due to many early immigrants coming from that region. Neither German nor others were numerous enough to influence the Chilean dialect, especially in the capital (Germans and Croats mostly got lands in the south).
But cachái doesn't come from English-speaking immigrants. It's just one of the many English loanwords present in modern languages. And despite living in Valdivia –a city that once had street signs in German– I can't recall any other German loanwords aside from kuchen.
I was trying to say that loanwords are generally present in languages. Modern German itself has many weirdly used English words without any immigrants to bring them in the first place.
> Still influenced the dialect, didn’t it?
A few food names do not qualify as "influenced the dialect" for me. Mapudungun did influence the Chilean dialect, but German did not. I generally find the "German influence in the south" very exaggarated and a cover-up for the fact that the primary influences in the south have always come from Mapuche culture.
But there's a broad veneration of Germans and other Europeans, combined with a disdain towards indigenous peoples and their cultures, so the "German South" myth withstands, along with that one photo of Puerto Varas taken from the right angle to make it look like a German town.
> Modern German itself has many weirdly used English words without any immigrants to bring them in the first place.
This is correct. Case in point: Beamer.
> A few food names do not qualify as "influenced the dialect" for me.
For you. That doesn’t change the fact that the term has widespread use all over the national territory.
> Mapudungun did influence the Chilean dialect
If you want to stress the point, I’d additionally argue that a larger amount of indigenous-derived terms (including several words for vegetables) came from the Quechua. Although, according to your own set of criteria, a few food names would not qualify.
There are more Quechua words, but yes, a few food names are not "language influence" in any seruous way. French influenced English and Russian, Arabic influenced Spanish, but the only linguistic legacy of Germans in Chile are kuchen, strudel, and some weird last names used as street names.
More than any of that, it's influenced by Mapuzungun in a way other countries just aren't exposed - Argentina's Conquest of the Dessert was more brutal, and is the only other modern country where Mapuche land was.
Desert, n, stress on the first syllable, means a place without much rain, but it comes from the notion of being deserted so sometimes it just means an unpopulated area.
To desert, v, stress on the second syllable, means to leave/abandon something.
Desert, n, stress on the second syllable, is what you deserve "he got his just deserts"
Dessert, n, stress on the second syllable, is a sweet course of a meal that follows the main course. It has an extra s because of its etymology not its pronunciation.
I'm quite sure this mess was designed to be as confusing as possible.
Spain Spanish isn't "Standard" Spanish though. The closest thing to "Standard" Spanish is what the RAE prescribes, but no one listens to them. Insurgencies and protests were fought over this fact in Spain during the Francoist and Post-Francoist era (eg. Andalusian, Murcian, Canarian, Leonese)
> It’s the farthest region from Spain, so the least communicated to the rest of the empire, and hence the one that drifted the most from the homeland.
Er... if you look at the table (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_...), Chile has quite a lot of red, but actually its Spanish is closer to the Spanish from Spain than that of other South American countries. So it looks like those have drifted further from "standard" Spanish, while Chile hasn't as much?