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How does one tell that the language you are hearing is Galecian and not Castellano? Any tricks?

Posted: Mon Mar 11, 2019 8:02 pm
by Dtmont
So to my ears Galician sounds exactly like Castellano. Are there any tell tale sounds that can easily give it away?

Re: How does one tell that the language you are hearing is Galecian and not Castellano? Any tricks?

Posted: Mon Mar 11, 2019 8:09 pm
by nooj
Sure.

/ʃ/, which only exists in certain dialects of Rio de Plata Spanish in Uruguay and Argentina, but exists in Galician. And I doubt you'd confuse Galician with Uruguayan Spanish!

Galician also has a bigger vowel inventory (seven) than Spanish (five).

Galician (in stressed position) distinguishes between these phonemes /i e ɛ a ɔ o u/, whereas Spanish has /i e a o u/. You will hear ɛ and ɔ as contextual allophones in dialects in Andalusia, but I don't think anyone would confuse Andalusian Spanish with Galician. Just the intonation alone is totally different.

Re: How does one tell that the language you are hearing is Galecian and not Castellano? Any tricks?

Posted: Mon Mar 11, 2019 8:13 pm
by David1917


The first language in this video is Galician. For me, the giveaway that it was not Spanish was the small presence of some nasal sounds, and the sch (x) sound - basically, sounds that are more closely associated with Portuguese. It's definitely tough! When I first watched this video I was like, "It's Portug... wait... no, it's not Spanish, but... Catalan? Some dialect?"

Re: How does one tell that the language you are hearing is Galecian and not Castellano? Any tricks?

Posted: Tue Mar 12, 2019 12:27 am
by zenmonkey
Dtmont wrote:So to my ears Galician sounds exactly like Castellano. Are there any tell tale sounds that can easily give it away?


You'll quickly hear words like "si" & "non" and "grazas", "e" instead of "yo" and "o", "a", "os" and "as" as articles. "ti" and "vos" as second person pronouns.