Why Do You Thound Different?

Growing up in Southern California, not far from Los Angeles, most everyone who spoke Spanish sounded the same as members of my family who spoke Spanish. The same inflection in the same places, same cadence, the same pronunciation… There were very little discrepancies in this social agreement of how the language sounds. Even the few accents that stood out, the few Puerto Ricans or Salvadorians that I knew, were not far off from what was familiar. The vagaries of encountering an unfamiliar accent were easily explained away by associating that particular accent only with that person. As a child it made sense that everyone spoke Spanish the same way and those who did not were completely unique in their pronunciation. When I heard Ricky Ricardo and the relatively direct and forward nature of the way his Cuban Spanish I assumed that was because he was always on the verge of slapping his wife. Outside of Ricky and a couple of others, everyone spoke the same way as far as I could tell.

The first time I heard a completely different system of pronunciation was when I was eleven years old and we took a family trip across Europe with stops in Spain. Their Spanish sounded different from what I’d heard my whole life to that point. It had a certain lilt to it. The emphasis came on different syllables than from what I was used to hearing. And of course there was the lisp. As a small child and I had quite the lisp. I was taunted and I was self conscious about it and I distinctly remember spending hours standing in front of the bathroom mirror staring at my mouth and forcing my tongue to stay in place when pronouncing those “s” versus “th” sounds. Then years later here was that lisp all around me! I realized the problem wasn’t that I had had a lisp as a child but that I was speaking Castillian Spanish! This was also my first encounter with a true class system which was really weird. There has always been the stereotype that Europeans are rude and see Americans as loud and obnoxious. Over the course of our trip those stereotypes had mostly gone unfounded. The Germans were stern and efficient but polite and straightforward. The Swiss and Italians were nothing if not welcoming. But Spain was a little different. For the most part we were treated kindly but on the edges of society, the café at the train station or the clerk at the local store, we were met with disdain. It was enough that we were American but we also spoke the language like Mexicans! Sin upon sin! Weird. Like I said, most everyone was nice but there were a few punks with bad attitudes.

FYI, people who are supposed to be Spanish have often claimed that the aforementioned lisp is in emulation of the adored King Ferdinand. There is absolutely no evidence to support this. Just wanted to let you know.

Once I got to New York there was an entirely new world of Spanish to hear. Mexicans are not the majority Hispanic culture as they are in Southern California. In New York there are Spanish speakers from the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and many other places off the mainland, places that we think of when we say “Caribbean.” As such the Spanish language has been influenced by so many other cultures including the natives of those areas, the other invading nations like the Dutch, French, and British, the slave traders and the slaves themselves. Everyone brought with them their own culture which influenced how the dominating language, Spanish, is now spoken. To my ears the Spanish spoken here in New York has a completely different rhythm. It seems more sing-songy to me, with the inflection continually ascending rather than descending. Mexican Spanish seems to share the same mode of pronunciation as American English in that as we speak we typically put the heaviest emphasis on the final syllable of the sentence unless we are specifically trying to make a point or draw attention somewhere else. The Spanish I hear around the Big Apple tends to have the heaviest emphasis at the beginning with the weight placed on the words tends to rise as the sentence continues. The slang is different too. They don’t even know what a “cholo” is around here (lucky bastards). Of course neither cited nor done any of my own scientific research, I’m merely going what I’ve heard around the water cooler.

I guess the root of it all is that whenever you have a language spoken by disparate groups of people they are going to develop their own ways and rules for how to speak that language. That’s why Latin became French, Spanish, and Italian. That’s why I could barely understand what anyone was saying when I visited Ireland, though remarkably the more I drank the easier it was to comprehend. And that’s why I have something to write about today.

Also, for those of you visiting from Brazil, stop asking if I speak Spanish only to start speaking Portuguese because I have no idea what you are saying. IT’S A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE.