El español de América — The Spanish of the Americas

Twenty-one countries, and the honest answer about which Spanish to learn

Spanish has around half a billion speakers and Spain holds under a tenth of them. Mexico alone has more Spanish speakers than Spain, Colombia and Argentina are each comparable in size to it, and the United States has more than any country except Mexico. Any sentence that begins real Spanish is therefore already wrong, whichever way it ends — and the joke Alex makes in the last line is the correct conclusion. An honest limitation first, of the same kind lesson 56 had to admit about Andalusia. This course is recorded in standard Peninsular Spanish and has only Peninsular voices, so Mariana's lines above are spoken in an accent she would not have. She would use seseo, so cinco and zapato with an s; she would use yeísmo with the Argentine ʃ, so calle closer to cashe; her intonation would rise and fall in a way that is often described as Italian, because a century of Italian immigration into Buenos Aires made it so. None of that is audible in the clips. If you want to hear it, the material is abundant and free: Argentine and Mexican film and television, RTVE's own Latin American coverage, and any number of podcasts recorded in Bogotá, Lima or Mexico City. Colombian Spanish from Bogotá is often recommended to learners as the clearest, and it is a reasonable recommendation. What actually differs between varieties is less than learners fear. The grammar is shared almost entirely: the same tenses, the same subjunctive, the same object pronouns. The real differences are the four in this lesson's grammar points — vos in some countries, no vosotros anywhere in the Americas, the preterite preferred to the present perfect, and a few hundred everyday words — plus pronunciation, which varies as much within Spain as between Spain and Mexico. A Madrid speaker and a Lima speaker understand each other immediately and completely. So which should you learn? The one you will use, and if you do not know, it does not matter, because this is not a choice you make once. You will be understood everywhere in whichever variety you speak, and you will adapt within days of arriving somewhere else — which is precisely what you have been doing in this course, learning Peninsular Spanish while a Canarian bus driver and an Argentine colleague correct you in turn. What does matter is consistency: pick one set of pronouns and stick to it rather than mixing tú with vosotros with vos in the same conversation. And be careful with the word correct. A Spaniard who calls Argentine Spanish wrong and an Argentine who calls Peninsular Spanish affected are both saying something about themselves rather than about the language.