Why do South American versions of European languages sound so beautiful, but the North American ones sound fucking awful?

I’m not getting the comparison.

Speak for yourself, OP. I happen to prefer Spain's Spanish.

Are you high?

OP, are you the Evening Punctuationist?

Surinaamse Nederlands is walgelijk.

Afrikaans, which is sometimes called “kitchen Dutch”, sounds like a cruder form of the mother tongue. The mother tongue is not very elegant or pretty either. I have heard some beautifully recited Afrikaans poetry, however. I wish I could have understood it because the sounds were hauntingly beautiful.

I've seen comments by some Dutch and Brazilians, for example, preferring American English because it's "easier to understand" than the British variety. I guess Americans aren't the only ones who have trouble comprehending those accents.

To my ear, Spanish as spoken in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic sounds coarse and trashy as compared to Spanish spoken almost everywhere else.

OP, have you heard Australians speak English? That's harsh.

You have no idea what you’re talking about Op. Does your observation include “North American” Spanish?

I don’t know - I’m getting a snoflakey vibe here.

Are you kidding ? The Spanish spoken in South America sounds like shit. It's broken spanish.

cause your a dumb race baiting piece of shit.....or an insecure Brazilian.

The Spaniards sound like they have a lisp. For 'corazón' (heart) they say cora-THONE. The 'Z' in Latin American Spanish is pronounced like an S (cora-SONE). The 'C' in Spain is also pronounced like 'th' in words like ' ' 'concepción' (conception). They say concepTHION. It becomes irritating after a while. I couldn't listen to the Madrid EVITA all the way through.

I met an old French Canadian woman who said she went to France once and could barely understand their French at all. Then while out in the countryside she found a local radio station which sounded very similar to her native tongue. The majority of French people have evolved a different dialect with newer slang vocabulary but that radio station was broadcast from more isolated, rural, mountainous area. The French Canadian woman said that Quebec French is probably closer to what France-French sounded like 100+ years ago. The French that the Acadian/Cajuns speak in Louisiana is even older, as they brought their French in 250 years ago and remained an insular community up until just a few decades ago.

Also, modern day England English is evolving quickly and doesn't sound how it did 100, 200, 300, 400 years ago. Shakespeare's contemporaries are believed to have sounded more like Scots from Edinburgh sound today. And some Appalachian regional dialects may also retain more of the English tone from when the colonists came over than modern England-English does. Language is very fluid and changing at unprecedented speed in the age of global immigration and television/movies/internet. If you don't like the sound of a regional dialect now, wait 10 or 20 years and it may sound very different.

Gimme a cuppa kawfee with sugah

Because White People just suck!! Everything about them is ugly, including their racist language!!

Argentine Spanish is said to be the most pleasant sounding. Chileans apparently talks so fast they must all be speed freaks.

R14 actually, linguists/historians have stated that the English spoken by the Brits and Colonists in the 17th century sounded closer to the standard American accent. It was in the 18th century that the Brits altered their speech. Similarly in the 1800s, the American elite altered their speech to sound like a hybrid of American/British. This so-called Mid Atlantic accent was eventually adopted by actors and broadcasters, but has since been phased out.

The 2008 HBO movie JOHN ADAMS went through great effort to get the 17th century accent right, which is how I learned all of this, then did my own research.

Ridiculous, OP. Brazilian Portuguese is a horror compared to European Portuguese

R14, r18,

[quote]Shakespeare's contemporaries are believed to have sounded more like Scots from Edinburgh sound today.

I, personally, wouldn’t argue with David Crystal or—nepotism notwithstanding—his son Ben Crystal. They’ve actually reconstructed the pronunciation of Shakespeare’s English, and it doesn’t sound all that Scottish to my (badly tuned?) Australian ear.

R14 - I speak English and Québécois. If I’m talking to my family and don’t want anyone to understand, I’ll speak Joual, the working class dialect of Montréal. The pronunciation is radically different.

When I speak French no one from Paris understands me. I’m fine with that.

R18 here! Sorry, meant to say 18th Century which is the 1700s.

R14 is right.

The French that came over in the 1600s is closer to rural French, almost a patois. It’s not a bit like tesxtbook or Parisian French.

I, for one, like the swooping cadences of Quebecois. I heard it as a child and it brings me home.

The Portuguese sound like they're swallowing a mouthful of marbles when they talk.

Say what you will about Brazilians, at least they know how to project when they speak.

[quote]The 'C' in Spain is also pronounced like 'th' in words like ' ' 'concepción' (conception). They say concepTHION.

That should've been conTHepTHion. See what I mean about the lisp? And it's awful to hear it being sung.

To me European Portuguese sounds like the Spanish trying to speak Swedish or German.

Brazilian Portuguese sounds like Spanish children trying to sound sexy in Swedish (and failing).

From my personal experience as a Spanish speaker, Brazilians can understand someone speaking Spanish, but we Spanish-speakers have a hard time understanding Portuguese.

I speak Spanish perfectly. Also, Spanish spoken in the Caribbean, such as in Cuba, does not all sound “trashy”. It depends on the levels of education received by those speaking it.

The people in my family who are well educated speak perfect Spanish, just like moi.

R13, it is [italic]distinción[/italic], which permits a Castilian listener to differentiate between casa /kasa/ and caza /kaθa/. In seseo dialect areas, where both words are pronounced /kasa/, one would have to pay attention to context.

[quote] Argentine Spanish is said to be the most pleasant sounding

Said no one ever. Argentinean Spanish is the most mocked of all the Spanish accents. CNN Español which broadcasts worldwide uses a Bogota Colombian accent as their staple so that alone should tell anyone that European Spanish just sounds horrible.

Brazilian Portuguese as a whole sounds better than most Euro dialects and is very unique due to its melting pot nature other Portuguese African colonies likw Cape Verde and Angola have an accent way closer to European Portuguese.

Argentine Spanish sounds Italians are speaking it.

Brazilians from Sao Paulo speak with an even heavier italianized accent than Argentineans since they hold the largest Italian population outside of Italy.

I guess if there is an African influence in the language (Brazilian Portuguese or Caribbean Spanish) then by the rules of SJW-dom it automatically must be superior.

r33 Not just SJWs.

19th-century Portuguese writer Eça de Queiroz would agree with OP - he described Brazilian Portuguese as, "Portuguese with sugar".

I don't know how much African influence there is in Brazilian Portuguese. African slaves did coin many words, and much is owed to them, for example in children's slang (eg, "dodói") - but they were already speaking Portuguese by then. I don't know any Brazilian Portuguese word borrowed directly from the African language of the slaves. It's far easier to spot loanwords from Native-Brazilian languages. "Piranha", for example.

I prefer Canadian French. It's more rustic and New Worldly and a little pirate-y.

Wouldn't call it superior just more pleasant. Belgian Dutch is also more pleasant to the ear than Holland Dutch it just is....

R20's video was fantastic but can you imagine an evening with these two? It's exhausting enough to watch on video.

Peruvians and Colombians speak beautiful Spanish. Whoever said South Americans speak “broken Spanish” is ignorant.

R2, yup

r38 I've heard that even South Americans see Chilean Spanish as a creole language. Too many innovation from standard Spanish. Can you confirm?

yo quiero taco bell

[quite] I've heard that even South Americans see Chilean Spanish as a creole language.

Quote the opposite actually. Given that Chile was so remote and had little contact with the outside world, it’s Spanish has evolved relatively little and is considered amongst the purest.

[quote] I've heard that even South Americans see Chilean Spanish as a creole language.

Quote the opposite actually. Given that Chile was so remote and had little contact with the outside world, it’s Spanish has evolved relatively little and is considered amongst the purest.

[quote] I've heard that even South Americans see Chilean Spanish as a creole language.

Quite the opposite actually. Given that Chile was so remote and had little contact with the outside world, its Spanish has evolved relatively little and is considered amongst the purest.

Lots of native influence as well make many castillian in southern America creole. Paraguayan Spanish is heavily influenced by Guarani which is spoken in most of the country and it's an official language same with quechua in Bolivia. Too many variants to count. I don't think Chilean Spanish is that peculiar in that regard.

Wikipedia says the following on Chilean Spanish:

[quote]Chilean Spanish (Spanish: español chileno, español de Chile or castellano de Chile) is any of several varieties of Spanish spoken in most of Chile. Chilean Spanish dialects have distinctive pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and slang usage that differ from those of standard Spanish.[2]

They use as reference for the latter claim an article from El País, which says the following:

[quote]No hay un español de España, y otro de América Latina, sino numerosas modalidades de la lengua española, aun dentro de un mismo país, tan válidas unas como otras. En los años 60, cuando yo estudiaba en Inglaterra, aparecía un aviso en un importante dominical de una academia de idiomas, que se vanagloriaba de dar clases hasta en 87 lenguas. Y en esa larga lista aparecían dos altamente peculiares: el spanish y el latinoamerican spanish, como si este último fuera uno solo y diferente, tanto que pudiera estudiarse separadamente del spanish, al tiempo que fuera una realidad monolítica. Y claro que hay diferencias, pero no de bloque a bloque, sino que antes que de continentes separados y contrapuestos, hay que hablar de constelación en la que cada uno ocupa el lugar que le corresponde. Así, el español de la meseta colombiana está mucho más próximo al de Castilla la Vieja, que al venezolano usual, y el costeño colombiano sí que se parece, en cambio, al venezolano caribeño: en ambos casos, chévere; el porteño y lo que se habla en Montevideo son primos hermanos, [bold]y el chileno es un producto genuino e inimitable por el resto del universo lingüístico del español.[bold]

Translation:

"... and Chilean [Spanish] is a genuine product, impossible to imitate for the rest of the Spanish linguistic universe." In other words, unlike the other variants of Spanish mentioned in the paragraph, it doesn't have any close cousins.

As an American of Brazilian parents, I speak fluent Portuguese and r27 is totally right. I've never taken a Spanish class but I can understand 60% to 80% of spoken Spanish (as long as they aren't using slang and are speaking nice and slow.) but the reverse doesn't happen. When I've traveled to Spanish speaking countries, my "Portuñol" is only understood in Uraguay and Southern Argentina, places in which many Brazilians travel to - which these Spanish speakers are more likely intuned to it.

There was a study back at least 10 years ago that looked at the spoken Spanish in Spain and Latin American countries. It found that the purist form of spoken Spanish was not from Spain, but from Columbia. Mexico came in second, only because their version of Spanish was heavily imbued with words from the Nahualt language, the language of the Aztecs.

R40 and R46 If you're interested in hearing what Chilean Spanish sounds like, there is a wonderful series called "Frutos del País", that are availabel on youtube. The program goes through several cities and towns in Chile, where they interview people in each place who share aspects of their city, town, or neighborhood that's interesting or beloved. You'll hear the Chilean accent in all it's regional variety. There is also a podcast called "La Historia es Nuestra", that presents interviews on different topics, both current affairs and topics of cultural interest.

If you listen to the podcast or watch the show, you'll see for yourself if you can understand Chilean Spanish. I'm sharing a funny program called "La lengua de Chile" from 2008 that has a humorous take on Chilean Spanish.

Portuguese in South America sounds coarse and harsh. You need your ears examined, OP.

Brazilian women have incredibly deep often masculine voices. I don't know if that's a Lusophone thing but it's weird.

r51 Video or didn't happen.