Argentine Spanish

Abstract

Although Spanish is a relatively unified language, in the sense that people from very distant locations manage to understand each other well, there are several phonetic phenomena that distinguish geographically separated varieties. The total number of native speakers of Spanish is above 400 million, and roughly 10% of them live in Argentina (Instituto Cervantes 2014). The accent described below corresponds to formal Spanish spoken in Buenos Aires, and the main allophones are indicated by parentheses in the Consonant Table. The recordings are from a 49-year-old college-educated male speaker, who has lived all his life in either the city of Buenos Aires or the province of Buenos Aires.