Showing posts with label Spanish. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spanish. Show all posts

pronouncing words from Spanish

American and British pronunciations of Spanish (loan)words: I’ve had notes for this post in my ‘drafts’ folder since 2006 (when I did a similar post on French loanwords). But today Ben at Dialect Blog posted on the subject. Impetus to get (a)round to saying what I have to say about the subject, don’t you think?  I’ll mention what Ben’s covered, but will supplement it rather than repeating it—so do read his post. 

There are two obvious reasons why American and British English speakers pronounce Spanish words differently when they need to pronounce them in English, and these result in different kinds of differences between AmE and BrE Spanish pronunciations.
First, there’s a lot more Spanish in the US than in the UK. A substantial part of the US used to be Spanish colonies, Puerto Rico is as close to being a US state as a place can be without being a US state (though Washington DC could argue with that statement) and there’s lots of immigration from Latin America. Of the 91% of US high schools that offer "foreign language" instruction, 93% offer Spanish, according to a 2009 Center for Applied Linguistics study (link is pdf). In contrast, in 2001 there were about 55,000 Spaniards living and working in the UK and more recently there have been more than 200,000 British people living at least part of the year Spain (but they're coming back in droves now.), not to mention lots of people holidaying/vacationing there. In the UK, French is the most widely taught language (EU report--link is pdf), though its numbers are going down and the number of teens taking Spanish is going up.  So there's certainly contact between Spanish and British people, but there's nowhere near the same number of people involved or amount of contact between Spanish and English speakers (or their cultures) in Britain compared to the US.

The amount of Spanish in the US means that even the most monolingual Americans hear and see quite a bit of it. If you went to Mass at 9:00 in my little northeastern hometown, you heard it in Spanish. (No big deal worship-wise if you consider that a decade before I was going to Spanish Mass, everyone was hearing their Mass in Latin.) If you go for fast food, you might need to know what pico de gallo is. It's natural to me as an American to pronounce a double-L as a 'y' sound if I see a word that ends in a or o.  One of the hardest things for me to learn in South Africa was to 'granadilla' as gran-a-dill-a even though I so wanted to say gran-a-deeya. (Never had to pronounce it in the US--we say passion fruit.)

Without this repetitive experience of Spanish spelling and pronunciation, the pronunciation of Spanish borrowings can be patchy in the UK. An ex-boyfriend's British father pronounced fajita as fadj-eye-ta (rather than fuh-hee-ta). Jalapeño tends to come out as ha-la-pee-no or even djae-la-pee-no, rather than the ha-la-pay-nyo or ha-la-pen-yo that Americans tend to say--since in the US they are likely to know what the ñ is for (or to have heard lots of people say it). And I've yet to hear an Englishperson say the edible salsa without the first syllable rhyming with gal. (I seem to recall hearing some BrE speakers use a more 'back' vowel in the dance salsa, but still use the more 'front' vowel in for the condiment.) At Dialect Blog there are other examples: paella and cojones. Maybe the food pronunciations will change soon. "Mexican street food" (which is considered to sound nicer than "Mexican fast food") is the big new-restaurant trend in Brighton these days; I counted three newish burrito places in a quarter-mile radius last week. But maybe this won't matter. No one seems very bothered about finding out the Thai pronounciations of any of the Thai dishes we've been scoffing/scarfing here for the past decade.

Of course AmE pronunciation of Spanish is not Spanish pronunciation. It's just a bit more Spanishy than BrE pronunciation, much of the time. One doesn't, for example, roll the 'r' in burrito in AmE.

The best example of unSpanish UK Spanish pronunciation, though, was pointed out to me by a New Yorker in the UK, who was amused by Brightonian pronunciations of the Spanish island Ibiza. The pronouncers in question were studiously lisping the 'z', but pronouncing the first syllable with a very un-Spanish 'eye' vowel. Britons are very studious about lisping  esses in Spanish words. 
Which brings us to the second reason for differences in Spanish pronunciation: the British mostly have contact with European Spanish and Americans with Latin American varieties. And, as you can imagine, there's every reason for those to be at least as different as AmE and BrE are. I’m having a bit of an experience of the differences as I listen to five-year-old Grover’s Spanish lessons. Having learnt generic Latin American Spanish with a Brooklyn accent in high school, in order to help Grover, I have to learn to harden my ‘j’s, lisp my ‘s’s and conjugate verbs for vosotros (Latin American Spanish has ustedes for plural ‘you’, with different verb forms). This has an effect on AmE/BrE pronunciations of recent loan words from Spanish. Dialect Blog discusses this in relation to rioja

Please add your examples in the comments. And Spanish speakers, I want to know: can you tell the difference between a British and an American accent when we attempt to speak Spanish?

Some other items business (read: self-promotion) before I go:
  • I'm in the latest Numberphile video, talking about math vs maths (again!). Have/take a look!
  • I'll be giving my 'How Americans Saved the English Language' talk at Tunbridge Wells Skeptics in the Pub on the 4th of July. Expect (verbal) fireworks! And cake! 
  • If you're on Twitter, I'm there, of course, giving a Difference of the Day five days a week and lots of links to Britishy-Americany-Englishy-language-y things. I also give a much smaller number of links via my Facebook page, so 'like' it if you'd like to get the occasional bit of news from me in your pages feed.

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crisps, chips and tortillas

My friend the Maverick received a news item about this bird through an evolutionary psychology e-mail forum:

The video, from the BBC, refers to the Doritos that the seagull eats as (BrE) crisps, but the source that Maverick read refers to them using the AmE term chips, which, of course, is the BrE word for AmE (french) fries.

However, the BrE crisps = AmE chips equation is not as straightforward as it might at first seem. This is demonstrated to us by the (UK) Daily Mail's story about the bird:
The rest of the flock flap around, begging for titbits (=AmE tidbits) and diving for scraps.
Not this fellow. He simply pops to the shops.
And his tastes, it seems, are rather particular. It has to be tortilla chips. [...]
He is now so popular that customers have started paying for his chips.
Crunchy fried potato slices are always (potato) crisps in BrE, but Doritos and other (AmE) tortilla chips are not so straightforward. When taken collectively with the other (BrE) packets/(AmE) bags at the front of the (BrE) corner shop/(orig. AmE) convenience store in the video, the Doritos are crisps, but when referring to Doritos and the like on their own, BrE speakers often use the American import tortilla chips. This is doubly foreign, since not only does chip mean something different than in AmE, but in BrE tortilla more often (in my experience) refers to the Spanish egg-and-potato dish than to the Mexican flatbread. (The 2007 draft entry in the OED also informs us that use of just tortilla to mean 'tortilla chip' is 'chiefly' BrE, and that the term Spanish tortilla is also used for the frittata-like dish--from the quotations, it looks like the Spanish prefix is mostly AmE.)

Better Half and I have a favo(u)rite Mexican restaurant in Brighton, and when we order chips and salsa there (which BrE BH pronounces with a first syllable like Sal and I in my AmE way pronounce with a first syllable more like Saul), we have, more than once, been asked to clarify whether we mean tortilla chips or (BrE) chips/(AmE) fries...in spite of the fact that their own menu reserves the term chips for the tortilla kind and uses fries for the thicker/softer potato kind. Tortilla chips is the more common term in BrE, with 31,500 UK Google hits--but with 14,500 hits, tortilla crisps has a respectable presence.

Cultural side note number 1: Americans are often surprised by the size of crisp/chip packets/bags in the UK. The largest bags in the UK are probably the size of the smallest bag that's not meant for individual consumption in the US, and often at parties in the UK, the host will have opened several individual-size bags (which can be bought in variety packs) into several small bowls. In the US, the biggest bags are comparable to a pillow in size and at parties the chips/crisps are presented in large, deep bowls. This does not--oh no, it does not--mean that the British are unenthusiastic consumers of wafer-thin fried potatoes. They consume, on average 7.2 kg per person per year, as opposed to 4 pounds (1.8 kg) per typical American. I presume that the limits on bag size in the UK have something to do with the limits on supermarket shelf space and home storage space. Because there are no (orig. BrE slang) ginormous bags of crisps/chips in the UK, there's also no need for the chip clip, which Americans use to keep their chips/crisps crunchy between pantry-raids.

CSN 2: British crisp/chip flavo(u)rs are more popular (in relation to plain, salted) and more imaginative than American flavo(u)rs--which, when I was growing up (i.e. before the dawn of 'gourmet' potato chips/crisps), were limited to salted, unsalted and barbecue. Cheese and onion is the nation's favo(u)rite (editorial note: [orig. AmE] ick) and salt-and-vinegar (which was available in New England in my youth, then spread to other parts of the US) must be close to the top. Flavo(u)rs that involve meat (steak and onion, chicken and thyme, prawn [AmE shrimp] cocktail) seem very popular too--a trend that has reached its peak, or perhaps its nadir, in the current offering of Cajun Squirrel flavo(u)r. (orig. AmE) 'Fess up: who among you has tasted them?

An unpleasant side effect of CSN 1 and CSN 2 is that when one's host pours the contents of more than one little crisp/chip packet/bag into a larger bowl, chances are that they'll have mixed together two flavo(u)rs, only one of which will be gag-inducing.

CSN 3: Pringles are served unironically at parties in the UK.

P.S. FuelMyBlog recently saw fit to interview me on my blogging habits. Click on if you see fit to care!
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Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)