Mexican Spanish

Mexican Spanish (Spanish: español mexicano) is a set of varieties of the Spanish language as spoken in Mexico and in some parts of the United States and Canada. Spanish was brought to Mexico in the 16th century. As in all other Spanish-speaking countries (including Spain), different accents and varieties of the language exist in different parts of the country, for both historical and sociological reasons. Among these, the varieties that are best known outside of the country are those of central Mexico—both educated and uneducated varieties—largely because the capital, Mexico City, hosts most of the mass communication media with international projection. For this reason, most of the film dubbing identified abroad with the label 'Mexican Spanish' or 'Latin American Spanish' actually corresponds to the central Mexican variety. Mexico City was built on the site of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire. Besides the Aztecs or Mexica, the region was home to many other Nahuatl-speaking cultures as well; consequently many speakers of Nahuatl continued to live there and in the surrounding region, outnumbering the Spanish-speakers, and the Spanish of central Mexico incorporated a significant number of Hispanicized Nahuatl words and cultural markers. At the same time, as a result of Mexico City's central role in the colonial administration of New Spain, the population of the city included a relatively large number of speakers from Spain, and the city and the neighboring State of Mexico tended historically to exercise a standardizing effect over the language of the entire central region of the country. The territory of contemporary Mexico is not coextensive with what might be termed Mexican Spanish. The Spanish spoken in the southernmost state of Chiapas, bordering Guatemala, resembles the variety of Central American Spanish spoken in that country, where voseo is used. Meanwhile, to the north, many Mexicans stayed in Texas after its independence from Mexico, and their descendants continue to speak a variety of Spanish known as 'Tex-Mex'. And after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo many Mexicans remained in the territory ceded to the U.S., and their descendants have continued to speak Spanish within their communities in Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. In addition, the waves of 19th- and 20th-century migration from Mexico to the United States (mostly to the formerly Mexican area of the Southwest) have contributed greatly to making Mexican Spanish the most widely spoken variety of Spanish in the United States. The Spanish spoken in the Gulf coastal areas of Veracruz and Tabasco and in the states of Yucatan and Quintana Roo exhibits more Caribbean phonetic traits than that spoken in the rest of Mexico. And the Spanish of the Yucatán Peninsula is distinct from all other forms in its intonation and in the incorporation of Mayan words. The First Mexican Empire comprised what is present-day El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, aside from the mentioned present states of United States; thus dialects of Costa Rican, Guatemalan, Honduran, New Mexican, Nicaraguan, and Salvadoran Spanish were originally included in the dialects of Mexican Spanish. Regarding the evolution of the Spanish spoken in Mexico, the Swedish linguist Bertil Malmberg points out that in Central Mexican Spanish—unlike most varieties in the other Spanish-speaking countries—the vowels lose strength, while consonants are fully pronounced. Malmberg attributes this to a Nahuatl substratum, as part of a broader cultural phenomenon that preserves aspects of indigenous culture through place names of Nahuatl origin, statues that commemorate Aztec rulers, etc. 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 they all contribute to the diversity of accents found throughout the country. For example, the intonation of some varieties of Mexican Spanish is said to be influenced by that of indigenous languages, including some which are tone languages (e.g. Zapotec). The tonal patterns and overlengthening of the vowels in some forms of Mexican Spanish were particularly strong among mestizos who spoke one of the native Mexican languages as their first language and Spanish as a second language, and it continues so today. Due to influence from indigenous languages, such as Nahuatl, the set of affricates in Mexican Spanish includes a voiceless alveolar affricate and a voiceless alveolar lateral affricate , represented by the respective digraphs ⟨tz⟩ and ⟨tl⟩, as in the words tlapalería ('hardware store') and coatzacoalquense ('from Coatzacoalcos'). Even words of Greek and Latin origin with ⟨tl⟩, such as Atlántico and atleta, are pronounced with the affricate: , (compare , in Spain and other dialects in Hispanic America). In addition to the usual voiceless fricatives of other American Spanish dialects (/f/, /s/, /x/), Mexican Spanish also has the palatal sibilant /ʃ/, mostly in words from indigenous languages—especially place names. The /ʃ/, represented orthographically as ⟨x⟩, is commonly found in words of Nahuatl or Mayan origin, such as Xola (a station in the Mexico City Metro). The spelling ⟨x⟩ can additionally represent the phoneme /x/ (also mostly in place names), as in México itself (/ˈmexiko/); or /s/, as in the place name Xochimilco—as well as the /ks/ sequence (in words of Greco-Latin origin, such as anexar /anekˈsar/), which is common to all varieties of Spanish. In many Nahuatl words in which ⟨x⟩ originally represented , the pronunciation has changed to (or )—e.g. Jalapa/Xalapa .