Thread: The difference between Spanish and Canary Islands Spanish

The spanish spoken in the best place in the world (Canary Islands) is very different to that spoken in mainland Spain. As you all probably know.

The speech tends to be more nasalised, blurred, often letters are completely missed out (ie dedo becomes deo (if youre particularly rustic)), and it goes up and down, similar to how scousers speak. I love the way i speak spanish. Its very similar to south american spanish. In fact Venezueala, Puerto Rico and Cuba were originally populated by people from The C.Islands.

Sometimes it gets ridiculous, and i have a hard time understanding whats being said : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtBRJzvAHUc

Its a very fascinating subject. Its late, but ill post more on this tomorrow. Feel free to discuss, boy and girls.

Oh, and feel free to give me a sentence in spanish, and ill try to write it out the way it would be said in the islands.

Hello again!

The little spanish i know i learned in firstly in the Costa Brava alongside Catalan.

When i moved to Tenerife almost ten years ago i was lost with the pronunciation unless people spoke slowly.
Now i have two little Canarian girls of six and four who correct me everyday.

It is a very different dialect from Castillian and much more south american and i can never imagine myself ever pronouncing a c or z as th!!!!!!!!!!!

Lazy? How dare you. Yeah, its lazy.

And there are different levels. Sometimes i can totally understand what someone is saying, but other times its all a blur. When im talking normally, i would say that a spanish person could understand most of what i say, but when i get ****ed off or whatever, my accent gets stronger and i blur my speech. And i use my hands a lot, even on the phone to my mum.

And recently ive realised that a lot of words that i use (much more than i thought) arent standard spanish. For example : engurruNado (i dont have the n with a line on top on my kbd, hence N). It means scrunched up. I dont even know what the spanish word for that is. There are thousands of words that arent standard spanish, and someone compiled a dictionary, its massive.

Its almost like a different language. The difference between spanish and C.I. spanish (or south american spanish) is about the same as the difference between standard english and jamaican patois, i think.

I love it. I love the way i talk. Its so casual and rustic. Can you tell that im obsessed?

Would you say the same about the other regions of Spain for example Galicia,catalunya,pais basco.

They have their own language but when they speak in Spanish there are thousands of local words incorporated.

Historically south american spanish in several countries evolved alongside indiginous languages so when natives spoke they included words the spanish conquerers would not understand.

Im a Tenerife guy and I understanding nothing

pd: That is a bad example "El Batu" is a popular flash guy in the tv canaria (dont ask me why). Is like I want to learning english in the london suburbs

Bloke :

I wouldnt know about the other regions, but i would imagine its the same. They have their own languages, so its already different anyway. In the C.I. its castillian, but it has evolved into something different. It would be like the difference between welsh people speaking english with a bit of welsh thrown in, and scousers speaking english, but differently.

The influences in Canary Islands speech are, as far as ive read :

the language of the guanches
portuguese
english
terms that come from south america

yeap love the Canarian accent - my ex was Gomeran - and how quickly do they speak and everything is so rolled.

When I was at school I didn't want to learn French or German as we always used to holiday as a family either in Spain or the Balearics. I never dreamed then that I would have lived in Tenerife for so many years.

How's about you teach us a few of those wonderful Canarian phrases that quite often don't mean what they say, if you know what I mean.

I can't put my dedo on one right now

Ni que poco...

ie, ni que poco grande = wow, thats big (or small, or whatever)

It makes no sense in english, and its a phrase that i never use, but my mum does.

Ni = neither
que = that (used as a conjunction, in the sense of : i told him that i did it)
poco = a bit

Weird. "neither that a bit..."



Quita palla

Quita = get off, remove
Pa(ra) (a)lla = to over there

As in, if someone is close to you and you want them to get away.



My minds blank, i cant think of any more right now.