Mexican Spanish () is the variety of dialects and sociolects of the Spanish language spoken in Mexico and its bordering regions. Mexico has the world's largest number of Spanish speakers, more than double any other country. Spanish is spoken by over 99% of the population, being the mother tongue of 93.8%, and the second language of 5.4%.
Variation
Mexican Spanish has a great deal of internal variation and is not necessarily coterminous with the country of Mexico. The Spanish spoken in the southernmost state of Chiapas, bordering Guatemala, resembles the variety of Central American Spanish spoken in that country, where is used. Meanwhile, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and later immigration led to a large number of Mexicans residing in what had become US territory, and many of their descendants have continued to speak Spanish.
Finally, the Spanish spoken in coastal areas often exhibits certain phonetic traits in common with Caribbean Spanish rather than with that of central Mexico, and the Spanish of the Yucatán Peninsula is quite distinct from other varieties. It should also be noted that there is great variation in intonation patterns from region to region within Mexico. For instance, the Spanish of northern Mexico, including the traditional Spanish of New Mexico, is characterized by its own distinct set of intonation patterns.
Regarding the evolution of the Spanish spoken in Mexico, the Swedish linguist Bertil MalmbergNot to be confused with the poet Bertil F. H. Malmberg. points out that in Central Mexican Spanish—unlike most varieties in the other Spanish-speaking countries—unstressed vowels are often devoiced or elided, while syllable-final consonants, especially , tend not to be reduced. Malmberg attributes this to a Nahuatl substratum.; rpt. Malmberg 1965: 99–126 and Malmberg 1971: 421–438. The Mexican linguist Juan M. Lope Blanch, however, finds similar weakening of vowels in regions of several other Spanish-speaking countries; he also finds no similarity between the vowel behavior of Nahuatl and that of Central Mexican Spanish; and thirdly, he finds Nahuatl syllable structure no more complex than that of Spanish. Furthermore, Nahuatl is not alone as a possible influence, as there are currently more than 90 native languages spoken in Mexico and Nahuatl never spread across the entire territory of modern Mexico.
Phonology Consonants +Consonant phonemes of Mexican SpanishLabialDental/AlveolarPalatalVelarNasalStopContinuantApproximantFlapTrill
Affricates Due to influence from indigenous languages, such as Nahuatl, Mexican Spanish has incorporated many words containing the sequences and , corresponding to the voiceless alveolar affricate and the voiceless alveolar lateral affricate , present in many indigenous languages of Mexico, as in the words ('hardware store') and ('from [the city of] Coatzacoalcos'). Mexican Spanish always pronounces the and in such a sequence in the same syllable, a trait shared with the Spanish of the rest of Latin America, that of the Canary Islands, and the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, including Bilbao and Galicia. This includes words of Greek and Latin origin with such as and . In contrast, in most of Spain, the would form part of the previous syllable's coda, and be subject to weakening, as in , .
Some claim that in Mexican Spanish, the sequence is really a single phoneme, the same as the lateral affricate of Nahuatl. On the other hand, José Ignacio Hualde and Patricio Carrasco argue that is best analyzed as an onset cluster on the basis that Mexicans take the same amount of time to pronounce as they do to pronounce and . They predicted that if were a single segment, it would have been pronounced quicker than the other clusters.
Fricatives In addition to the usual voiceless fricatives of other American Spanish dialects (, , ), Mexican Spanish also has the palatal sibilant , mostly in words from indigenous languages—especially place names. The , represented orthographically as , is commonly found in words of Nahuatl or Mayan origin, such as (a station in the Mexico City Metro). The spelling can additionally represent the phoneme (also mostly in place names), as in itself (); or , as in the place name Xochimilco—as well as the sequence (in words of Greco-Latin origin, such as ), which is common to all varieties of Spanish. In many Nahuatl words in which originally represented , the pronunciation has changed to (or )—e.g. .
Regarding the pronunciation of the phoneme , the articulation in most of Mexico is velar , as in ('box'). However, in some (but not all) dialects of southern Mexico, the normal articulation is glottal (as it is in most dialects of the Caribbean, the Pacific Coast, the Canary Islands, and most of Andalusia and Extremadura in Spain). Thus, in these dialects, , and are respectively pronounced , , and .
In northwestern Mexico and rural Michoacan, , represented by , tends to be deaffricated to , a phonetic feature also typical of southwestern Andalusian Spanish dialects.
All varieties of Mexican Spanish are characterized by : the letters and correspond to the same phoneme, .This same phoneme is rendered with a non-IPA symbol by many authors, including Canfield and Lipski, using the RFE Phonetic Alphabet. In IPA, it stands for the close front rounded vowel. The IPA symbol is also inappropriate for this sound - see . That phoneme, in most variants of Mexican Spanish, is pronounced as either a palatal fricative or an approximant in most cases, although after a pause it is instead realized as an affricate . In the north and in rural Michoacan, is consistently rendered as an approximant and may even be elided when between vowels and in contact with or , as in 'hen', 'chair', and 'seal'.
As in all American dialects of Spanish, Mexican Spanish has seseo, so is not distinguished from . Thus, 'house' and 'hunt' are homophones.
Present in most of the interior of Mexico is the preservation, or absence of debuccalization, of syllable-final . On the other hand, -weakening is very frequent on the Pacific and Caribbean coasts, and is also fairly frequent in northern and northwestern Mexico, and in parts of Oaxaca and the Yucatán peninsula. In all these regions, -weakening acts as a sociolinguistic marker, being more prevalent in rural areas and among the lower classes. The prevalence of a weakened syllable-final in so many peripheral areas of Mexico suggests that such weakening was at one point more prevalent in peripheral areas, but that the influence of Mexico City has led to the diffusion of a style of pronunciation without -weakening, especially among the urban middle classes.
-weakening on both the Pacific and the Gulf Coast was strengthened by influences from Andalusian, Canarian, and Caribbean Spanish dialects.
Also, the dialects spoken in rural Chihuahua, Sonora, and Sinaloa, like that of New Mexico, have developed aspiration of syllable-initial , as in words like 'to pass' and 'sir'., cited in
Despite the general lack of s-aspiration in the center of the country, is often elided before or , and the phrase is often pronounced without the first .
Stops There is a set of voiced obstruents—, , , and sometimes —which alternate between approximant and plosive allophones depending on the environment.
often becomes , especially in more rural speech, such that and may be pronounced as and . In addition, is often assimilated to .
Speakers from the Yucatán, especially men or those who are older, often pronounce the voiceless stops with aspiration.
Vowels +FrontCentralBackCloseMidOpen Like most Spanish dialects and varieties, Mexican Spanish has five vowels: close unrounded front , close rounded back , mid unrounded front , mid rounded back , and open unrounded .
Mexican Spanish, particularly that of central Mexico, features a high rate of reduction, which can involve shortening and centralization, devoicing, or both, and even elision of unstressed vowels, as in (, 'cooking utensils'). This process is most frequent when a vowel is in contact with the phoneme , so that + vowel + is the construction when the vowel is most frequently affected. It can be the case that the words , , and are pronounced the same . The vowels are slightly less frequently reduced or eliminated in the constructions + vowel + , so that the words , , and may also be pronounced the same .
Morphology
Mexican Spanish does not use voseo outside some parts of Chiapas. The traditional familiar second person plural pronoun —in colloquial use only in Spain—is found in Mexico only in certain archaic texts and ceremonial language. However, since it is used in many Spanish-language Bibles throughout the country, most Mexicans are familiar with the form and understand it. An instance of it is found in the national anthem, which all Mexicans learn to sing: ("Mexicans, at the cry of war / assemble the steel and the bridle").
Mexicans tend to use the polite personal pronoun in the majority of social situations, especially in Northern Mexico. In the north, children even address their parents with .
In rural areas of Sonora, Chihuahua, Durango, Jalisco, Guanajuato, and Tlaxcala, many people use a number of distinct non-standard morphological forms: second person preterite verb forms ending in , instead of ; imperfect forms such as , instead of ("brought, believed"); merging and verb conjugations, such as using , instead of ("we live"); non-standard forms, such as (instead of ), with non-standard , also used in words such as , instead ("I believe"); an accent shift in the first person plural subjunctive forms, such as , instead of ("we go"); and a shift from to in proparoxytonic third person singular verb forms, such as , instead of ("we sing"). These same verb forms are also found in the traditional Spanish of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado.
Suffixes
Central Mexico is noted for the frequent use of diminutive suffixes with many nouns, adverbs, and adjectives, even where no semantic diminution of size or intensity is implied. Most frequent is the suffix, which replaces the final vowel on words that have one. Words ending with -n use the suffix . Use of the diminutive does not necessarily denote small size, but rather often implies an affectionate attitude; thus one may speak of "" ("a nice, big house").
When the diminutive suffix is applied to an adjective, often a near-equivalent idea can be expressed in English by "nice and [adjective]". So, for example, a mattress () described as might be "nice and soft", while calling it might be heard to mean "too soft".
In some regions of Mexico, the diminutive suffix is also used to form affectives to express politeness or submission (, literally "little coffee"; , literally "little head"; "little boy"), and is attached to names (, from ; , from —cf. Eng. ) denoting affection. In the northern parts of the country, the suffix is often replaced in informal situations by (, , , ).
Frequent use of the diminutive is found across all socioeconomic classes, but its "excessive" use is commonly associated with lower-class speech.
The augmentative suffix is typically used in Mexico to make nouns larger, more powerful, etc. For example, the word , in Mexico, means ; the suffixed form means "big or long bus". It can be repeated just as in the case of the suffixes and ; therefore means .
The suffix or and its feminine counterparts and respectively, are used as a disparaging form of a noun; for example, the word , meaning "house", can be modified with that suffix () to change the word's meaning to make it disparaging, and sometimes offensive; so the word often refers to a shanty, hut or hovel. The word ("wood") can take the suffix () to mean "rotten, ugly wood".
Other suffixes include, but are not limited to: as in , which refers to a very impressive car () such as a Ferrari or Mercedes-Benz; , for example , meaning "big-nosed" ( = "nose"), or , a female with large feet ().
Nicknames