On Nov 8, 2011, at 11:05 AM, Matthew Rosier wrote: > > > I don't have much knowledge on linguistics, but I can tell you my wife says > Castellano is spoken in Mexico (which of course is still MOSTLY Spanish). She > always just says Spanish though casually as well.
Syntactically, she's correct, formal Spanish is the official language of Mexico. Pronunciation wise, she's a little too far to the east. Most of the early speakers of Spanish who came to the new world were not from Castile, but from the west of Spain in Estamadura and other hard-scrable places where life was hard. So they didn't have the "high" speech, hence no "th" sounds, the "ceceo" which evolved in Castilian and is today used for "z" and the ç or cedilla. To further illustrate except for Brazil (Portuguese) Belize & Guiana, (English), French Guiana (French) and Curaçao (Dutch), everyone in Latin America speaks Spanish. But you'll discover that it's spoken in Chili with a different accent than in Columbia, and that's different from Paraguay, etc. And you get into the Caribbean, you get even more diversity. Study Spanish in Mexico then listen to people from Cuba or Puerto Rico and the contractions will make you nuts. It's like the accents and slang in the US and UK, it varies from region to region. But it's Spanish in Mexico, not "Mexican." Best, R.E.F. ---- www.crydee.com Never attribute to malice what can satisfactorily be explained away by stupidity.
