LANGUAGE
Everyone knows that Spanish is the language of the River Plate Republics; but, while the written Spanish of South America is one with literary Spanish all the world over, the spoken language of Argentina and Uruguay differs from Castilian in many respects.
The first of these, and probably the most interesting, is the survival in South America of words in common use in the days of the early conquistadores and colonists but which have long ago fallen into disuse in Spain.
These words gave a deal of trouble a few years ago to certain Argentine amateur philologists who made more or less ingenious endeavours to derive them from the aboriginal Quichúa or Guaraní.
It was reserved for Mr. Paul Groussac, a Frenchman and the custodian of the Argentine National Library, to inform these derivation hunters, in a coldly sarcastic little pamphlet, that they would find all the words that were puzzling them intact in the works of Cervantes and other old Spanish authors.
So it is with many Britons not learned in philology. There are many words and expressions commonly regarded as Americanisms which in truth went to New England in the Mayflower.
There are also several striking differences between the pronunciation of Spanish on the River Plate and in Spain. Thus the “ll” which is liquid in pure Castilian is given in South America a sound very much like the French “j” in je. This, I believe to have come to the New World with the Galician immigration.[11]
In the beginning of historical times the various Galician dialects prevailed over the whole Peninsula; Galician subsequently developing into modern Portuguese and the Castilian dialect, with much more widely divergent steps of development, becoming the accepted language of Spain.
Also the Argentine and Uruguayan disdain the lisping “θ” sound given by Spaniards to the letter “z” and in a lighter degree to “c.” In South American Spanish “z,” soft “c” and “s” are indistinguishable to the ear; all three being given the same sound as an English “s.” There is also, as might be expected, a distinct difference of intonation between Spanish as she is spoken in South America and in Spain. Everyone who has learned to speak Spanish in a South American country ever afterwards carries with him oral evidence of the place of origin of that linguistic acquirement; just as does a foreigner who has learned English in the United States. So it is with South African Dutch; and (may it be said?) Australian English. And all Colonists of either English, Dutch or Spanish origin are consciously proud of their own particular fashion of speaking and, either secretly or openly, regard the intonation of the older country as rather effeminately affected. De gustibus, etc.
Really, I suppose, there is no good or bad “accent,” as these differences of intonation are commonly called. It is like flavour, chiefly, if not entirely, a matter of custom and taste. Pronunciation, however, seems more frequently a matter of fashion, recurrent as are other fashions in easily dated periods.
Probably the South American pronunciation of Spanish mostly dates back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; with, perhaps, an added blunt plainness born of generations of free rough life on the vast expanses of the Pampa.
Modern innovations in the written or spoken language of Argentina and Uruguay can usually be traced to the great stream of immigration constantly flowing to these countries, chiefly from Italy and Spain.