When I hear Mexicans speaking Spanish, it sounds like it’s another language in comparison to Spanish people. Is it true, or am I just confused because of the accent?
Item
issuer
Quora
Language
English
Date Accepted
11/29/19
Title
When I hear Mexicans speaking Spanish, it sounds like it’s another language in comparison to Spanish people. Is it true, or am I just confused because of the accent?
list of contributors
Martin Roberts
content
I think you are just confused because of the accent, as that and regional variations do get in the way of understanding between native speakers of any language, especially when the latter crosses an ocean.
To give you an example in English, ABC chose to remake the BBC series "Life on Mars", because they judged Americans would find Harvey Keitel easier to understand than his British equivalent, Philip Glennister, who speaks with a thick Mancunian accent.
This does not mean Americans and Brits speak an essentially different language, and for most purposes we can understand each other quite well enough.
I also understand your perplexity, because I lived in Mexico for many years and when I first saw an Almodóvar film, I thought the cast all had loosely fitting false teeth and were speaking into their armpits.
The thing is that Spaniards tend to speak much more quickly than Mexicans and suppress consonants (e.g. "mercao" not "mercado"), but I quickly got used to this when I moved to Spain.
As opposed to Brits and Americans, at least Spaniards and Mexicans can agree on spelling and grammar, if not always on vocabulary or everyday usage.
In my experience, and merely by way of comparison, by far the biggest transatlantic linguistic gulf exists between the Portuguese spoken in Brazil and that in Portugal.
To give you an example in English, ABC chose to remake the BBC series "Life on Mars", because they judged Americans would find Harvey Keitel easier to understand than his British equivalent, Philip Glennister, who speaks with a thick Mancunian accent.
This does not mean Americans and Brits speak an essentially different language, and for most purposes we can understand each other quite well enough.
I also understand your perplexity, because I lived in Mexico for many years and when I first saw an Almodóvar film, I thought the cast all had loosely fitting false teeth and were speaking into their armpits.
The thing is that Spaniards tend to speak much more quickly than Mexicans and suppress consonants (e.g. "mercao" not "mercado"), but I quickly got used to this when I moved to Spain.
As opposed to Brits and Americans, at least Spaniards and Mexicans can agree on spelling and grammar, if not always on vocabulary or everyday usage.
In my experience, and merely by way of comparison, by far the biggest transatlantic linguistic gulf exists between the Portuguese spoken in Brazil and that in Portugal.