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What are the differences between Spanish which is spoken in Spain (by Spaniards) and Spanish which is spoken in Latin America?

Item

issuer

Quora

Language

English

Date Accepted

11/29/19

Title

What are the differences between Spanish which is spoken in Spain (by Spaniards) and Spanish which is spoken in Latin America?

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Lorena Espinoza

content

Actually I don’t have much experience with Spanish spoken in Spain besides the “seseo”, but I have experience with different accents in Latin America after I worked for a few years for an international airline call center were we had to take answers from all Latin America and also English calls from the US. The main differences were the Puerto Ricans that pronounced the r’s as l’s (puelto lico) or some dominicans based in the US that adopted Spanglish into their vocabulary, like saying “le llamo pa trás” like “I’ll call you back”. Also differences in vocabulary or intonation.

The call center was based in Chile (I’m Chilean) and we had to make an effort to speak slowly and not to use slang, because due to typical Chilean low self steem there was this belief that we spoke the worst Spanish accent, that we spoke really fast, that no one outside Chile could understand us, this misconception was so strong that even a popular series we had about 15 years ago had to be “dubbed” to neutral Spanish in order to be understood by the rest of the Spanish speaking countries, only because we pronounce final s as h and we speak fast, that after my experience with listening to all the other Latin American accents it’s nothing, it’s just different