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How is the table of dialects constructed? It's obvious if two dialects are at 1, but what does it mean if they're at 0? They can't be mutually unintelligible, s

How is the table of dialects constructed? It's obvious if two dialects are at 1, but what does it mean if they're at 0? They can't be mutually unintelligible, since that would make them different languages. I ask because the dialects spoken in Argentina and in Uruguay are practically identical, save for a few regional words. If the scale being used puts them at 0.35, then it makes me wonder about the usefulness of the scale.

cdelsolar 2y ago
Yeah, I was wondering about these two countries myself. Also it was very strange to see the Peru and Cuba correlation, those two dialects are nothing alike.
prmoustache 2y ago
I have no idea. Also there is no standard spanish even in Spain. Like Andalucian spanish and Domenican spanish have a lot in common but vary greatly with other forms of spanish.
- digging 2y ago
  There literally is a standard Spanish, no? I understand it to be based on Castilian. However I understand your point that even within the country of Spain there are many dialects which diverge from "standard".
  - School-Cotton 2y ago
    > There literally is a standard Spanish, no? Not really. Just like English, the standard variety in each country is considered equally "standard". > I understand it to be based on Castilian. I'm not sure what you mean by this. As far as I know Castilian is just a synonym for the Spanish language (as opposed to other languages of Spain e.g. Catalan). So the variety spoken in Guatemala and the one in Tenerife are equally "Castilian".
    - digging 2y ago
      No, it's not like English. There is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Spanish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Spanish. It is maintained by the: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Spanish_Academy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Spanish_Academy. In practice, I'm not sure what the impact is. I'm not a native Spanish speaker. But Spanish is not like English in regard to prescriptive norms.
      - servilio 2y ago
        Spanish native here, confirming that RSA is the institution that sets the language standard. But, people always deviate from it, though in my experience in word meanings and pronunciation, never in grammar to a degree that it become intelligible to another Spanish speaker. The toughest film to listen to for me was "The rose seller"[1] (1998), took me like 10m to get my ear accustomed to their pronunciation. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASrxQCuVT-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASrxQCuVT-U
        Gualdrapo 2y ago
        The paisa accent is very hard, even for us non-paisa colombians - not only for its colloquialisms but for its cadence.
        anthk 2y ago
        So is the Andalusian accent from a Northern Spaniard like me, it's close to the prosody and speech of the US Southern accent. The first 20 minutes understanding Risitas were pure hell. But you get used to it in a few days. It's like some American trying to understand the Scott/Welsh (can't remember now) sheperd not exposed to it. I'm pretty sure they could be used to it in less time than a week.
        actionfromafar 2y ago
        To my non-roman ear it sounds a little like Italian.
      - deleted 2y ago
  - joseda-hg 2y ago
    There's "neutral" spanish, but it's less of a formal standard and more of a rough subset that people recongnize it's generally understandable to most people It being so artificial means that it doesn't fit anywhere, even it if's becoming more common (Kids are growing up listening to Media dubbed to it, so it's not weird seing a Child "speak like a cartoon" for a while until their local dialect kicks in)
    - prmoustache 2y ago
      It is what I usually call the "TV" or "media" standard. Same in french, the french language you listen on TV is very uncommon if you actually talk to french people from different areas of France and it is not even common in Paris.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - pvaldes 2y ago
    The royal Academy of Spanish has the mission of promoting language unity, the American vocabulary is huge so a lot of words are really puzzling for people in other countries, but there is a common root that can be used.
  - neither_color 2y ago
    The differences between Spanish "dialects" are overstated IMO and closer to accents. No two Spanish accents are as different as the dialects of Arabic or dialects of Chinese are from each other. People will share anecdotes about not being able to understand different words(like straw, car, computer) but the underlying grammar is the same in all varieties. Im natively fluent in both English(US) and Spanish and I find English accents way harder to understand than Spanish ones. The only time Ive felt completely clueless listening to English was talking to a Scottish man.
- albrewer 2y ago
  When I was getting my degree, two of my classmates spoke Spanish as a first language. One was a transfer student from Madrid, and the other was an immigrant from northern Mexico. I was in the room the first time they met and tried speaking Spanish to one another. They couldn't understand each other and communicated solely in English after about 10 minutes.
  - Gualdrapo 2y ago
    The funny thing is that both Spaniards and Mexicans claim to use the most neutral spanish, but you'd find their idiosyncrasies rather quickly - spaniards' 'f' sound of the letter S, and the infinite modisms and particular mexican accent on the other hand. As the Spanish empire extended its spread so widely the language grew pretty complex (as english did!) so not even the most "neutral" spanish speaking countries do it as the RAE intends. On the other hand, Chileans really do speak their very own language.
    - Phrodo_00 2y ago
      > Chileans really do speak their very own language Only informally. Formal Chilean Spanish is probably one of the most understandable ones, accent-wise. (There's still some vocabulary differences)
      - flobosg 2y ago
        This idea is somewhat prevalent among native Chilean speakers, but I respectfully disagree. Even under formal settings, many of the features of colloquial Chilean variants are present, and often an additional effort to neutralize the accent needs to be made to sound “formal enough” to other Spanish speakers.
        Phrodo_00 2y ago
        One thing is that pretty much the only place you'll see formal chilean is in like, the news, or official government communication. We're not very formal people, so even in workplaces or school we wouldn't use 100% formal register.
jhbadger 2y ago
Dialects can mean very different things hence the old joke "a language is a dialect with its own army and navy", recognizing that the issue is really political rather than linguistic. Many Chinese dialects (like Mandarin and Cantonese) are considered dialects of the same "Chinese language" for political reasons but are mutually unintelligible, whereas Danish and Norwegian (the majority bokmal dialect anyway) are considered different languages even though they are pretty mutually intelligible because Norway and Denmark are different countries. As for how the table of Spanish dialects was constructed, the figure gives the link to the paper it was from [1]. Basically they measured differences in dialects by giving pictures of an item (the example shown is a pinwheel) and asking what Spanish speakers from different places called that thing. Given hundreds of different concepts you can see how close Spanish dialects are to each other. [1] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opli-2018-0035/html https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opli-2018-003...
- fluoridation 2y ago
  Okay, so the article is wrong for using that bit of data for the argument. It doesn't tell you much about how well two people from two different places will understand each other. If two people are in the same place and one says to the other "¿me das la veleta?", but the other would have called the object "molinete", chances are they could probably understand what the other person is saying. What makes different dialects of Spanish difficult to understand each other is slang and accent, not different words for common objects. Like, if a Spaniard tells me "Mariana está en el ordenador", I'm not going to get confused about what he means even if I would have called it "computadora".
  - jhbadger 2y ago
    True, but that's like saying a British person wouldn't be confused by the phrase "the trunk of my car" said by an American even if they would would say "the boot of my car" themselves. The fact still remains than "trunk" is US dialect and "boot" is British, and that the dialects are different.
    - 2y ago
posix86 2y ago
> but what does it mean if they're at 0? They can't be mutually unintelligible, since that would make them different languages. I think it might actually mean unintelligible. If you read on the term "dialect" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect it says in part: > There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing two different languages from two dialects (i.e. varieties) of the same language. The difference between language is more culturally and politically defined than linguistically; there are different langauges spoken in the world that have a fiar overlap and elligibility, and there are different dialects of the same "language" that are basically untelligable. It might be sensible to just consider all spoken systems to be "dialects" of each other, and comparing their similarity. Not a linguist though.
cryptonector 2y ago
I agree. Argentine and Uruguayan Spanish are very close. I'd expect to have seen .85 or so. Argentine and Chilean Spanish are not that far apart either -- or at least they weren't 30 years ago.
kragen 2y ago
yeah, literally the only difference i can think of is 'contigo' (which is 'con vos' in argentina)
- svcphr 2y ago
  People from both countries can speak a version of Spanish that is mutually intelligible. But if you go into a high school (or even listen to adults that are being very casual) then it'd sound wildly different. I speak Chilean Spanish. Distinctive characteristics include no use of vos; the "tú" conjugation is often "-ai" (cómo estai?) or "-i" (qué teni allí?); saying weón every sentence; using "po" for emphasis (sí po!); specific words like "fome" (boring), "la raja" (awesome), "bacán" (cool); phrases like "estoy cagado de hambre", "estoy chato", "pasarlo chancho", "cachai?"... It's also very related to class, at least in Chile. Even I struggle to understand people in tougher neighborhoods of Santiago.
  - kragen 2y ago
    sorry, i was talking about the differences between buenos aires spanish and uruguay spanish. i totally cacho that chilean is a different language entirely, however much germán garmendia tries to pretend otherwise :)
    - svcphr 2y ago
      Ohhh. That makes way more sense. I was surprised “contigo” was only difference that came to mind haha
  - khazhoux 2y ago
    Q: How many meanings does "weón" have? A: Yes

cdelsolar 2y ago

Yeah, I was wondering about these two countries myself. Also it was very strange to see the Peru and Cuba correlation, those two dialects are nothing alike.

prmoustache 2y ago

I have no idea. Also there is no standard spanish even in Spain. Like Andalucian spanish and Domenican spanish have a lot in common but vary greatly with other forms of spanish.

digging 2y ago
There literally is a standard Spanish, no? I understand it to be based on Castilian. However I understand your point that even within the country of Spain there are many dialects which diverge from "standard".
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  > There literally is a standard Spanish, no? Not really. Just like English, the standard variety in each country is considered equally "standard". > I understand it to be based on Castilian. I'm not sure what you mean by this. As far as I know Castilian is just a synonym for the Spanish language (as opposed to other languages of Spain e.g. Catalan). So the variety spoken in Guatemala and the one in Tenerife are equally "Castilian".
  - digging 2y ago
    No, it's not like English. There is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Spanish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Spanish. It is maintained by the: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Spanish_Academy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Spanish_Academy. In practice, I'm not sure what the impact is. I'm not a native Spanish speaker. But Spanish is not like English in regard to prescriptive norms.
    - servilio 2y ago
      Spanish native here, confirming that RSA is the institution that sets the language standard. But, people always deviate from it, though in my experience in word meanings and pronunciation, never in grammar to a degree that it become intelligible to another Spanish speaker. The toughest film to listen to for me was "The rose seller"[1] (1998), took me like 10m to get my ear accustomed to their pronunciation. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASrxQCuVT-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASrxQCuVT-U
      - Gualdrapo 2y ago
        The paisa accent is very hard, even for us non-paisa colombians - not only for its colloquialisms but for its cadence.
        anthk 2y ago
        So is the Andalusian accent from a Northern Spaniard like me, it's close to the prosody and speech of the US Southern accent. The first 20 minutes understanding Risitas were pure hell. But you get used to it in a few days. It's like some American trying to understand the Scott/Welsh (can't remember now) sheperd not exposed to it. I'm pretty sure they could be used to it in less time than a week.
      - actionfromafar 2y ago
        To my non-roman ear it sounds a little like Italian.
    - deleted 2y ago
- joseda-hg 2y ago
  There's "neutral" spanish, but it's less of a formal standard and more of a rough subset that people recongnize it's generally understandable to most people It being so artificial means that it doesn't fit anywhere, even it if's becoming more common (Kids are growing up listening to Media dubbed to it, so it's not weird seing a Child "speak like a cartoon" for a while until their local dialect kicks in)
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    It is what I usually call the "TV" or "media" standard. Same in french, the french language you listen on TV is very uncommon if you actually talk to french people from different areas of France and it is not even common in Paris.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- pvaldes 2y ago
  The royal Academy of Spanish has the mission of promoting language unity, the American vocabulary is huge so a lot of words are really puzzling for people in other countries, but there is a common root that can be used.
- neither_color 2y ago
  The differences between Spanish "dialects" are overstated IMO and closer to accents. No two Spanish accents are as different as the dialects of Arabic or dialects of Chinese are from each other. People will share anecdotes about not being able to understand different words(like straw, car, computer) but the underlying grammar is the same in all varieties. Im natively fluent in both English(US) and Spanish and I find English accents way harder to understand than Spanish ones. The only time Ive felt completely clueless listening to English was talking to a Scottish man.
albrewer 2y ago
When I was getting my degree, two of my classmates spoke Spanish as a first language. One was a transfer student from Madrid, and the other was an immigrant from northern Mexico. I was in the room the first time they met and tried speaking Spanish to one another. They couldn't understand each other and communicated solely in English after about 10 minutes.
- Gualdrapo 2y ago
  The funny thing is that both Spaniards and Mexicans claim to use the most neutral spanish, but you'd find their idiosyncrasies rather quickly - spaniards' 'f' sound of the letter S, and the infinite modisms and particular mexican accent on the other hand. As the Spanish empire extended its spread so widely the language grew pretty complex (as english did!) so not even the most "neutral" spanish speaking countries do it as the RAE intends. On the other hand, Chileans really do speak their very own language.
  - Phrodo_00 2y ago
    > Chileans really do speak their very own language Only informally. Formal Chilean Spanish is probably one of the most understandable ones, accent-wise. (There's still some vocabulary differences)
    - flobosg 2y ago
      This idea is somewhat prevalent among native Chilean speakers, but I respectfully disagree. Even under formal settings, many of the features of colloquial Chilean variants are present, and often an additional effort to neutralize the accent needs to be made to sound “formal enough” to other Spanish speakers.
      - Phrodo_00 2y ago
        One thing is that pretty much the only place you'll see formal chilean is in like, the news, or official government communication. We're not very formal people, so even in workplaces or school we wouldn't use 100% formal register.

jhbadger 2y ago

Dialects can mean very different things hence the old joke "a language is a dialect with its own army and navy", recognizing that the issue is really political rather than linguistic. Many Chinese dialects (like Mandarin and Cantonese) are considered dialects of the same "Chinese language" for political reasons but are mutually unintelligible, whereas Danish and Norwegian (the majority bokmal dialect anyway) are considered different languages even though they are pretty mutually intelligible because Norway and Denmark are different countries. As for how the table of Spanish dialects was constructed, the figure gives the link to the paper it was from [1]. Basically they measured differences in dialects by giving pictures of an item (the example shown is a pinwheel) and asking what Spanish speakers from different places called that thing. Given hundreds of different concepts you can see how close Spanish dialects are to each other. [1] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opli-2018-0035/html https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opli-2018-003...

fluoridation 2y ago
Okay, so the article is wrong for using that bit of data for the argument. It doesn't tell you much about how well two people from two different places will understand each other. If two people are in the same place and one says to the other "¿me das la veleta?", but the other would have called the object "molinete", chances are they could probably understand what the other person is saying. What makes different dialects of Spanish difficult to understand each other is slang and accent, not different words for common objects. Like, if a Spaniard tells me "Mariana está en el ordenador", I'm not going to get confused about what he means even if I would have called it "computadora".
- jhbadger 2y ago
  True, but that's like saying a British person wouldn't be confused by the phrase "the trunk of my car" said by an American even if they would would say "the boot of my car" themselves. The fact still remains than "trunk" is US dialect and "boot" is British, and that the dialects are different.
  - 2y ago

posix86 2y ago

> but what does it mean if they're at 0? They can't be mutually unintelligible, since that would make them different languages. I think it might actually mean unintelligible. If you read on the term "dialect" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect it says in part: > There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing two different languages from two dialects (i.e. varieties) of the same language. The difference between language is more culturally and politically defined than linguistically; there are different langauges spoken in the world that have a fiar overlap and elligibility, and there are different dialects of the same "language" that are basically untelligable. It might be sensible to just consider all spoken systems to be "dialects" of each other, and comparing their similarity. Not a linguist though.

cryptonector 2y ago

I agree. Argentine and Uruguayan Spanish are very close. I'd expect to have seen .85 or so. Argentine and Chilean Spanish are not that far apart either -- or at least they weren't 30 years ago.

kragen 2y ago

yeah, literally the only difference i can think of is 'contigo' (which is 'con vos' in argentina)

svcphr 2y ago
People from both countries can speak a version of Spanish that is mutually intelligible. But if you go into a high school (or even listen to adults that are being very casual) then it'd sound wildly different. I speak Chilean Spanish. Distinctive characteristics include no use of vos; the "tú" conjugation is often "-ai" (cómo estai?) or "-i" (qué teni allí?); saying weón every sentence; using "po" for emphasis (sí po!); specific words like "fome" (boring), "la raja" (awesome), "bacán" (cool); phrases like "estoy cagado de hambre", "estoy chato", "pasarlo chancho", "cachai?"... It's also very related to class, at least in Chile. Even I struggle to understand people in tougher neighborhoods of Santiago.
- kragen 2y ago
  sorry, i was talking about the differences between buenos aires spanish and uruguay spanish. i totally cacho that chilean is a different language entirely, however much germán garmendia tries to pretend otherwise :)
  - svcphr 2y ago
    Ohhh. That makes way more sense. I was surprised “contigo” was only difference that came to mind haha
- khazhoux 2y ago
  Q: How many meanings does "weón" have? A: Yes