7 ms·
The lowest of the low? Based on consonant pronunciation? How can you extract a value judgment from how someone speaks?
by sam537 3y ago
The lowest of the low? Based on consonant pronunciation? How can you extract a value judgment from how someone speaks?
- jcranmer 3y agoIt's using pronunciation to infer regional/class origins, and it's widespread in most languages. See for example southern accents in American English, which can be associated with rednecks.
- ithkuil 3y agoSadly that's what humans do and have done since forever and it is an important driving factor in language evolution
- b800h 3y agoVia a class system. US movies imply you have the same thing over there.
- jghn 3y agoYes. It's not unlike how people assume someone with a rural/southern US accent is dumb.
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoAccent based class system and discrimination is rampant everywhere: UK, Italy, Romania, Austria, etc.
- jfengel 3y agoEvery language group has a hierarchy of accents, often roughly corresponding to wealth. There is usually a prestige accent used by the wealthy, and which the upper classes mimic. And everyone looks down on rural people, marked by their accent. It's worse in some places than others but it's practically universal.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fcatalan 3y agoThere's a bit of "accentism" in Spain. Speaking with a southern accent will (wrongly) mark you as "lazy", "uncultured" or "unsophisticated" to some people. I was born in Castile, so I usually speak "accentless" standard Spanish, but my mother comes from Extremadura, just a couple hours drive to the south, and when I speak to her I involuntarily switch to the extremaduran accent. I don't notice it but other people hearing me for the first time are shocked by the sudden switch. Extremaduran accent has the same aspirated x and s mentioned in the article, so for "This is Extremadura" I'll tend to say "Ehto é Ehtremaura" to my mother and "Esto es Extremadura" to other people. Another curiosity is that many of the original "conquistadores" (Cortés, Pizarro) hailed from Extremadura.
- ChainOfFools 3y agoI've noticed strong shades of this in various dialects of Caribbean Spanish too; I didn't know there was a name for it much less a possibly correlated colonial origin.
- ttfkam 3y agoI have never heard of Castilian Spanish referred to as "accentless" before. The lisp always sounds odd to me. That and vosotros. The vast majority of Spanish speakers worldwide use neither.
- salomon812 3y agoNorthern New Mexico uses "vosotros." No one told us not to. (Or so I'm told, see my main comment.)
- prpl 3y agoI actually learned both in high school (Las Cruces) but moved to Utah and dropped vos/vosotros. (grew up in Farmington before that)
- fcatalan 3y agoOf course it's just another variety, but it's the one equivalent to the Received Pronunciation or "BBC English". People also tend to consider it the "original" one because, well... the language started in Castile. Up until a couple decades ago, if you wanted to have a career on national TV, radio or as an actor, toning down any other accent and switching to Castilian was a requirement, or at least would help a lot. Nowadays not so much, but still happens enough that in Spain a Castilian accent is perceived as "not having one".
- the_only_law 3y ago> How can you extract a value judgment from how someone speaks? I mean it’s not exactly uncommon. I have the luck of having a southern U.S. accent and I’ve been told (mostly by people from outside the US in fairness) that they were surprised I wasn’t a raging racist.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Turing_Machine 3y agoAsk anyone who has a "hillbilly" accent how they're treated by "educated" people.
- mejutoco 3y agoInterestingly, I have often seen in movies with hillbilly characters dubbed to Spanish, their accent is dubbed in andalusian accent. I alway found it quite offensive.
- anthk 3y agoIt shouldn't be. Most of the people who went from Spain overseas was from Andalucia, the South American accent came from the Southern Spain. Also, lots of spelling traits in Southern English from the US map 1:1 to Andalusian Spanish, such as omiting vowels between consonants and speaking really fast.
- mejutoco 3y agoI am not sure if that is true (it might be). In Argentina they call spaniards gallegos, like from Galicia, the Spanish region north of Portugal. Do you have an example of omiting vowels between consonants? IMO the whole Spain speaks quite fast.
- anthk 3y agoAh, sorry, I guess I was droopy. I meant consonant between vowels: Reventado -> Reventao Colocado -> Colocao On vowels between consonants, maybe "tarántula" -> Trántula spelling it really fast in a hurry. But what I meant with the Andalusian accent being really fast and omiting vowels, they do in a way pretty close to the Southern US English accent. Also, the Andalusians got a lot of arabisms (more than former Spanish) such as zaguán, babuchas, alcancía, alhaja, alcoba... the same way the Southern US English got lots of borrowings from Spanish.
- mejutoco 3y ago