European Spanish vs American Spanish: How Different Are they?

Spanish is a very old language, dating back to the last centuries of the first millennium AD. Though it is not easy to put a date to the birth of a language and it often takes a good deal of arbitrariness to do so, we could say that by the end of the seventh century AD, Latin in the Iberian Peninsula had already turned into something else.

Rafael Lapesa, in his classic reference book Historia de la Lengua Española¹, states the following

The Romance language spoken in Spain at the end of the Visigothic period was in an incipient state of formation, and still showed very primitive characteristics. (127; my translation)

It was not quite the same language we call Spanish today, yet it was not Latin anymore. It was its first stage of development, and that would make Spanish as old as 1300 years old! Such a long period of time is enough for almost anything to evolve and change considerably.

Indeed, modern Spanish is very different to what it was back then, and it has had the time to derive into very different versions of itself. Linguists call such versions dialects². The older the language, the more dialects it is likely to have.

Sometimes those dialects are so different from each other that they change into something completely different. Then, the term dialect does not apply anymore and linguists start talking about different languages. That was what happened to Latin: the different dialects spoken throughout the Roman Empire derived into the modern Romance languages, such as Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian or Portuguese.

When does a dialect become a language? Nothing more difficult to know. Linguists have not agreed yet, and a great deal of subjective opinion can be involved when establishing the distinction sometimes. The criteria are very diverse and fuzzy, and mutual understandability is not really an agreed upon criterion as one might think in the first place.

An example: a few years ago, I had to spend a night in a very cheap hostel in London. I was very excited about a job interview I was having the following morning and I could not sleep, so I spent hours chatting with Ricardo, an Italian guy I had to share the room with. Ricardo did not speak a word of English, yet we spoke about plenty of different things, such as girls, globalization, cinema, and any other random topics you could imagine. I spoke Spanish to him, and he spoke Italian to me. Did we understand each other? We did indeed! Yet, Spanish and Italian are not considered to be dialects, but two whole different languages.

So, how about European Spanish and American Spanish? Are they two dialects of the same language (Spanish), or are they two completely different languages? This question would never be asked in the Spanish speaking world, since nobody there would ever even think of them as two different languages at all. The same applies to the English speaking world: no one in London or Liverpool would have any problems acknowledging the fact that he or she speaks the same language as Madonna, Barack Obama or any other USA citizen, i.e. the English language. Besides, the question would not be a valid one anyway on the grounds that it makes the issue far too simplistic: there is not just one European Spanish dialect and there is not just one American Spanish dialect.

An important fact comes to mind: Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world as for the number of native speakers is concerned. There are more than 6,000 languages, and Spanish is second only to Chinese. According to SIL's Ethnologue³ -arguably the most comprehensive linguistic atlas ever published-, the statistics for the 5 most widely spoken languages go like this:

A language spoken by so many people in so many countries throughout so many centuries will inevitably be the sum of many versions of itself. When Spaniards landed on American shores, they took their language from Europe to America not as a homogeneous entity, but as a collage of accentual and lexical variation. At the same time, native Americans there spoke many languages, each of them a mosaic of dialect variety themselves.

When we say European Spanish, we mean an abstraction of the different varieties of Madrid, Seville, Majorca, Gran Canaria, Valladolid, Bilbao and all the many other regions of Spain where Spanish is spoken. American Spanish is, in its turn, a reductionist way of addressing a complex reality, that of the different dialects spoken in Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, USA, and so on. This complexity cannot be neglected if we want to make valid comparisons, since many linguistic characteristics are shared by many of the varieties and not others, and they overlap very frequently.

So, European Spanish and American Spanish: how different are they? Well, it depends. They are never so different as to have great problems understanding one another, and official institutions such as La Real Academia Española work hard to make the whole Spanish speaking world never be too far apart as to let another great Romance language change happen. Some words are genuinely American, such as guagua, and boludo, but most people will understand them in Spain -and in some regions even use them-, and vice versa. Spanish is a rich varied language, and addressing differences will have to be done attending to more accurate regional and social criteria.

* You will find this hub translated into Spanish on my website soon, www.vmtranslator.com.

¹Lapesa, Rafael, 1981. Historia de la Lengua Española, Eleventh edition. Madrid, Spain: Gredos

²Chambers, J.K. & Peter Trudgill, 1998. Dialectology, Second edition. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press

³ Lewes, M. Paul (ed.), 2009. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International