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Spanish Pronunciation in the US and UK by Tom Rowse
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Spanish Pronunciation in the US and UK |
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Public Speaking,Art and Culture,Communication
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Even though these days it is accepted that languages change, and it therefore becomes difficult to say that a word has been pronounced incorrectly, there are some cases when it must still be done. It is less likely that Hispanic immigrants in America will be categorically told that their accent is incorrect, than it is that an English speaker will be corrected for their mispronunciation of Spanish words. Americans and English people each tend to make different mistakes when speaking Spanish. This is partially because of the difference in their native dialects of English and partially because Americans are more likely to be exposed to Latin-American dialects of Spanish, while Her Majesty's subjects are more frequently in contact with Spaniards. More people speak Spanish in the USA than in the UK. There are a lot of immigrants from Mexico and other parts of Latin America and many people speak Spanish as a second language. Of the 91% of US high schools that offer "foreign language" instruction, 93% offer Spanish, according to a 2009 Center for Applied Linguistics study. In contrast, in 2001 there were about 55,000 Spaniards living and working in the UK and more recently there have been more than 200,000 British people living at least part of the year Spain. A lot of Brits like to go on holiday in Spain and on Spanish islands like Ibiza. British people are generally exposed to the Spanish language a lot less than their American cousins, thats why some Englishmen pronounce fajita as fadj-eye-ta (rather than fuh-hee-ta). You can sometimes hear English people call Jalapeños ha-la-pee-nos rather than ha-la-pay-nyo or ha-la-pen-yo which Americans usually say. Some peopel think that the increasing popularity of Mexican food (gotta love that carnitas!) will mean that British people's Spanish will improve, but paella has been popular in England for a long while, yet Brits still insist on calling it PIE-ELL-AH. In both English and American-English, some forms of Spanish pronunciation, such as the lisping 's' and the rolling 'r' are seen as effeminate as may be deliberately avoided by macho Anglophones. The lisping s sound is less common in latin-America anyway nor is it used in standard Castilian Spanish. Therefore, words like salsa, sierra, sorprender, etc., don't have any lisping sound at all. So we all make mistakes on both sides of the pond, but they are out mistakes, and are contributing to the way Spanish is changing and being spoken differently around the world! The arguments about who makes more mistakes in speaking Spanish, Americans or Brits, run aground when they boil down to differences in Spanish pronunciation in Europe and the new world. America may be the 5th-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, but almost all of that is down to Mexicans, who don't own a copyright on the Spanish language any more than the Spaniards do. Anyone who needs Spanish translation services should be aware that the differences in Spanish dialects are as great as those in the English dialect, and to ensure they hire the right professional for the job. You wouldn't want a
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