Spanish dialects in Latin America BY PROFESSOR TONY ARTIGAS
The Spanish of America is the set of linguistic varieties of Spanish spoken on the American continent and makes up 90% of the Spanish speakers on the planet. However, Spanish-speaking America is not a monolingual territory. The countries that comprise it often use two or more languages that coexist with Spanish. The origin of these languages is very diverse; there are Creole varieties of Spanish (Palenquero and Colombian) and English, as well as mixed modalities and territories that preserve other European languages, as is the case of German in southern Chile. However, Spanish is the main tool of communication and has very similar characteristics to the dialects of southern Spain, specifically the linguistic variety of Andalusia and the Canary Islands. Unlike these, English borrowings are much more frequent, there is a strong influence of indigenous languages and there are particular regional idiomatic expressions. Establishing a classification of the dialec...