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Mexican Spanish Dialect

 

The Spanish dialect came to Mexico around the 16th century, and made Mexico City the centre of the viceroyalty of Mexico in colonial America. Administrators and officials from peninsular Spain who spoke the dialect of the educated, and influenced the development of the Mexican Spanish dialect were chosen to reflect their own stringent standards. Mexico City was claimed as the the capital city of the Aztec Empire, and orators of the Aztec Nahuatl language remained and thrived in the local lands.

The Mexican Spanish dialect is, therefore, extremely sophisticated, and sprinkled with numerous Nahuatl words. Attention must also be drawn to the fact that different varieties of Mexican Spanish are spoken throughout Mexico. The language of the Spaniards occupying the Yucatan peninsula is similar to the dialects of Central America. Migrations from Mexico to the USA during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have caused Mexican Spanish to become the most common dialect of Spanish throughout the USA.

A prominent characteristic of the Mexican Spanish dialect, especially in the central part of the country, is the frequent use of unstressed vowel reduction and elision. This is a common practice when a vowel is in contact with “s,” and “e” is the vowel that is mainly affected. On the other hand, the syllable-final /s/ is rarely weakened. This feature, combined with frequent unstressed vowel reduction, gives the sibilant “s” a prime significance. In Mexican Spanish dialects, words ending with “n” are pronounced differently than in other Spanish dialects.

The pronunciations of words ending with the letter “x” vary. They are pronounced similarly to “x” as in the English word “box” throughout the central Mexico, while in coastal regions of Mexico, they are pronounced like an “h.” The Mexican Spanish dialect varies from other Spanish dialects especially if we consider the way in which the vowels are given importance. Such as, there is a full pronunciation of the consonants. This characteristic related to the vowels and consonants is similar to that of the Nahuatl language.

The Mexican Spanish dialect uses several syntactic patterns that are regarded as ungrammatical by the standards of the Spanish Language Academy in Spain. They are the conservative abbreviation of the negative particle “no” in the clauses that include the preposition ‘hasta´ which means “until,” and the colloquial use of the phrase, “mucho muy” in place of the superlative. A number of words, which are no longer used in the Standard Spanish dialect, are still a part of the lexicon of the Mexican Spanish dialect.