Serpent wrote:arthaey wrote:the marked y/ll of Argentina, or dropped syllable-final S of the Caribbean region
Uruguay is generally forgotten, but phonetically it seems to share the key features with Argentina. The vocabulary has some differences of course.
In fact, the the Buenos Aires region of Argentina and south of Uruguay have the same accent, known as "Rioplatense". There are small differences between the accents of the two countries, but it seems that some natives from other parts of Latin America (and Spain) can't tell those differences. Uruguayans certainly know how to distinguish one from the other, where as for Argentines... some of us can, some of us can't. There are also some Argentines who can't exactly tell that someone's accent is from Uruguay, but can notice there's "something fishy" in the way he/she speaks.
Serpent wrote:I thought dropping the final S (or more precisely replacing it with an h, weaker than j) is common all over Latin America? At least I can guarantee that I've heard commentators from Argentina and Uruguay doing that.
I think most Spanish-speaking countries have some form of S dropping. In some places, this practice is standard, but in others it's associated with certain regions or social classes. In Buenos Aires, for example, the S dropping at the end of the words (i.e. pronouncing "las horas" as "la hora") is common among speakers from the working or lower classes, and it's strongly frowned upon by the rest. But in other regions of the country, where Rioplatense accent is not used, this practice is more common.
By the way, Arthaey, probably you'll have to take into account the number of regional accents within the same country. Not all the speakers from the same nation speak the same way. Someone from Northern Mexico may have a different accent than someone from the Mexican South, for example. Differences among social classes and access to formal education are also involved in the differences among the speakers from the same country.
