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Andean Spanish
Andean Spanish is a dialect of Spanish spoken in the central Andes, from southern Colombia, with influence as far south as northern Chile and Northwestern Argentina, passing through Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. While similar to other Spanish dialects, Andean Spanish shows influence from Quechua, Aymara, and other indigenous languages, due to prolonged and intense language contact. This influence is especially strong in rural areas. Phonology * In Andean Spanish, the is never aspirated in the final position and so is pronounced , not , but it is sometimes pronounced apical, rather than laminal, a trait characteristic of Northern Spain. The apical sound is sometimes perceived as transitional between and , and it is associated with a large number of northern Spanish settlers in Andean region. In southern Bolivia and northern Chile, syllable-final /s/ is mostly aspirated. * As in all American dialects of Spanish, Andean Spanish has ( is not distinguished from ). Thus, ("ho ...
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Seseo
In Spanish dialectology, the realization of coronal fricatives is one of the most prominent features distinguishing various dialect regions. The main three realizations are the phonemic distinction between and ('), the presence of only alveolar ('), or, less commonly, the presence of only a denti-alveolar that is similar to ('). While an urban legend attributes the presence of the dental fricative to a Spanish king with a lisp, the various realizations of these coronal fricatives are actually a result of historical processes that date to the 15th century. Origins Castilian 'lisp' A persistent urban legend claims that the prevalence of the sound in Spanish can be traced to a Spanish king who spoke with a lisp, whose pronunciation spread via prestige borrowing to the rest of the population. This myth has been discredited by scholars. traces the origins of the legend to a chronicle of Pero López de Ayala which says that Peter of Castile "lisped a little" (). However, ...
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Pluperfect
The pluperfect (shortening of plusquamperfect), usually called past perfect in English, characterizes certain verb forms and grammatical tenses involving an action from an antecedent point in time. Examples in English are: "we ''had arrived''" before the game began; "they ''had been writing''" when the bell rang. The word derives from the Latin , "more than perfect". The word "perfect" in this sense means "completed"; it contrasts with the "imperfect", which denotes uncompleted actions or states. In English grammar, the pluperfect (e.g. "had written") is now usually called the past perfect, since it combines past tense with perfect aspect. (The same term is sometimes used in relation to the grammar of other languages.) English also has a '' past perfect progressive'' (or ''past perfect continuous'') form: "had been writing". Meaning of the pluperfect The pluperfect is traditionally described as a tense; in modern linguistic terminology it may be said to combine tense with gra ...
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Quechuan Languages
Quechua (, ), also called (, 'people's language') in Southern Quechua, is an indigenous language family that originated in central Peru and thereafter spread to other countries of the Andes. Derived from a common ancestral " Proto-Quechua" language, it is today the most widely spoken pre-Columbian language family of the Americas, with the number of speakers estimated at 8–10 million speakers in 2004,Adelaar 2004, pp. 167–168, 255. and just under 7 million from the most recent census data available up to 2011. Approximately 13.9% (3.7 million) of Peruvians speak a Quechua language. Although Quechua began expanding many centuries before the Incas, that previous expansion also meant that it was the primary language family within the Inca Empire. The Spanish also tolerated its use until the Peruvian struggle for independence in the 1780s. As a result, various Quechua languages are still widely spoken today, being co-official in many regions and the most spoken language in ...
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Voseo
In Spanish grammar, () is the use of as a grammatical person, second-person grammatical number, singular pronoun, along with its associated verbal forms, in certain regions where the language is spoken. In those regions it replaces , i.e. the use of the pronoun and its verbal forms. can also be found in the context of using verb conjugations for with as the subject pronoun (#Verbal voseo and pronominal voseo, verbal voseo). In all regions with , the corresponding unstressed object pronoun is and the corresponding possessive is . is used extensively as the second-person singular in Rioplatense Spanish (Argentina and Uruguay), Chilean Spanish, Media Luna, Eastern Bolivia, Paraguayan Spanish, and much of Central American Spanish, Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica); in Mexico, in the southern regions of Chiapas and parts of Oaxaca. It is rarely used, if at all, in places such as Cuba and Puerto Rico. had been traditionally used in ...
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Intonation (linguistics)
In linguistics, intonation is the variation in Pitch (music), pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus (linguistics), focus an expression, to signal the illocutionary act performed by a sentence, or to regulate the flow of discourse. For example, the English language, English question "Does Maria speak Spanish or French?" is interpreted as a yes-or-no question when it is uttered with a single rising intonation contour, but is interpreted as an alternative question when uttered with a rising contour on "Spanish" and a falling contour on "French". Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, its effects almost always work hand-in-hand with other Prosody (linguistics), prosodic features. Intonation is distinct from Tone (linguistics), tone, the phenomenon where pitch is used to distinguish words (as in Mandarin Chinese, Mandarin) or to mark grammatical features (as in Kinyarwanda). Transcription Most transcription convention ...
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Mexican Spanish
Mexican Spanish () is the variety of dialects and sociolects of the Spanish language spoken in Mexico and its bordering regions. Mexico has the largest number of Spanish speakers, more than double any other country in the world. Spanish is spoken by over 99% of the population, being the mother tongue of 93.8%, and the second language of 5.4%. Variation The territory of contemporary Mexico is not coextensive with what might be termed Mexican Spanish, since linguistic boundaries rarely coincide with political ones. The Spanish spoken in the southernmost state of Chiapas, bordering Guatemala, resembles the variety of Central American Spanish spoken in that country, where is used. Meanwhile, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo led to a large number of Mexicans residing in what had become US territory, and many of their descendants have continued to speak Spanish. In addition, the waves of 19th- and 20th-century migration from Mexico to the United States, have contributed greatly to ...
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Voiced Postalveolar Fricative
The voiced postalveolar or palato-alveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The International Phonetic Association uses the term ''voiced postalveolar fricative'' only for the sound , but it also describes the voiced postalveolar non-sibilant fricative , for which there are significant perceptual differences, as one is a sibilant and one is not. Voiced palato-alveolar fricative The voiced palato-alveolar fricative or voiced domed postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. Transcription The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is the lower case form of the letter Ezh (), and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is Z. An alternative symbol used in some older and American linguistic literature is , a ''z'' with a caron. In some transcriptions of alphabets such as the Cyrillic, the sound is represented by the digraph . Although present in English, the sound is ...
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Yeísmo
(; literally "Y-ism") is a distinctive feature of many dialects of the Spanish language, characterized by the loss of the traditional palatal lateral approximant phoneme (written ) and its merger into the phoneme (written ). It is an example of delateralization. In other words, and represent the same sound when is present. The term comes from one of the Spanish names for the letter (). Over 90% of Spanish speakers exhibit this phonemic merger. Similar mergers exist in other languages, such as French, Italian, Hungarian, Catalan, Basque, Portuguese or Galician, with different social considerations. Occasionally, the term () has been used to refer to the maintenance of the phonemic distinction between and . Pronunciation Most dialects that merge the two sounds represented by and realize the remaining sound as a voiced palatal fricative , which is much like in English ''your''. However, it sometimes becomes a voiced palatal affricate , sounding somewhat li ...
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Cajamarca
Cajamarca (), also known by the Quechua name, ''Kashamarka'', is the capital and largest city of the Cajamarca Region as well as an important cultural and commercial center in the northern Andes. It is located in the northern highlands of Peru at approximately 2,750 m (8,900 ft) above sea level in the valley of the Mashcon river. Cajamarca had an estimated population of about 226,031 inhabitants in 2015, making it the 13th largest city in Peru. Cajamarca has a mild highland climate, and the area has very fertile soil. The city is well known for its dairy products and mining activity in the surroundings. Among its tourist attractions, Cajamarca has numerous examples of Spanish colonial religious architecture, beautiful landscapes, pre-Hispanic archeological sites and hot springs at the nearby town of Baños del Inca (Baths of the Inca). The history of the city is highlighted by the Battle of Cajamarca, which marked the defeat of the Inca Empire by Spanish invader ...
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Cusco Region
Cusco, also spelled Cuzco (; ), is a department and region in Peru and is the fourth-largest department in the country, after Madre de Dios, Ucayali, and Loreto. It borders the departments of Ucayali on the north; Madre de Dios and Puno on the east; Arequipa on the south; and Apurímac, Ayacucho and Junín on the west. Its capital is Cusco, the historical capital of the Inca Empire. Geography The plain of Anta contains some of the best communal cultivated lands of the Department of Cusco. It is located about above sea level and is used to cultivate mainly high altitude crops such as potatoes, tarwi (edible lupin), barley and quinoa. Provinces * Acomayo (Acomayo) * Anta (Anta) * Calca ( Calca) * Canas (Yanaoca) * Canchis (Sicuani) * Chumbivilcas (Santo Tomás) * Cusco (Cusco) * Espinar (Yauri) * La Convención ( Quillabamba) * Paruro ( Paruro) * Paucartambo ( Paucartambo) * Quispicanchi ( Urcos) * Urubamba ( Urubamba) Languages According to the 2007 ...
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Indigenous Languages Of The Americas
The Indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas before the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples. Over a thousand of these languages are still used today, while many more are now extinct. The Indigenous languages of the Americas are not all related to each other; instead, they are classified into a hundred or so language families and isolates, as well as several extinct languages that are unclassified due to the lack of information on them. Many proposals have been made to relate some or all of these languages to each other, with varying degrees of success. The most widely reported is Joseph Greenberg's Amerind hypothesis, which, however, nearly all specialists reject because of severe methodological flaws; spurious data; and a failure to distinguish cognation, contact, and coincidence. According to UNESCO, most of the Indigenous languages of the Americas are critically endangered, and many are dormant (wit ...
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