SPANISH IN THE WORLD
Spanish in the world
 
Spanish language in Latin America

In the South and Central America they speak Spanish with some peculiar linguistic characteristics. First of all, it doesn’t exist the second person plural: vosotros is substituted by ustedes and all verbs are then used in the third person plural

Grammatically speaking it doesn’t exist, or it is very unusual to speak with the Present Perfect (pretérito perfecto). They rather prefer the Past Simple (indefinido) also to describe recent actions.

For what concerns phonetics and phonology, Spanish of Latin America sounds like the language spoken in the South of Spain (Andalusia). They pronounce “s” even when there’s a “c”or a “z” followed by “e/i” or “a/o/u” and the sounds of “y” and “ll” are more or less the same.

The Hispanic-American vocabulary differs from the Castilian one for many aspects. Quite in general, we can observe that in Latin American they use many archaisms, that actually are so considered in the Iberian paninsula, but not in America. For example, the word lindo, which was used in the Spanish language of the 17th century and which was later substitued by the Spanish bonito or hermoso, is still widely used in Latin America. Other differences can be generated by different uses of the same word in both varieties. For example, the word chula in the two continents has different meanings: in Spain has a negative connotation and describes a too much uninhibited behaviour, while in some American territories the adjective chula is a synonym for a pretty and attractive girl. In the sense we can also mention the fact that, normally Latin America recibes much more foreign linguistic influences from English, but translates into “Spanish” all words that in Castilian derives from French; for example, the word souvenir, totally common in Castilian, is translated into the Latin American variety into recuerdo.