User:DeGuayama

DeGuayama is Spanish for FromGuayama. Guayama is a city in Puerto Rico.

I searched Wikipedia and Google to see if there are any articles on Spanish as regionally pronounced in Puerto Rico. I did not see anything substantive so I wanted to write one to add to Wikipedia's knowledge base.

DeGuayama (talk) 16:39, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

This is a somewhat long quote, but necessary to introduce the main material. Though this is a clearly dated quote, it applies today even more than it did when it was written. According to Butt and Benjamin (1988), “There was an age–-it seems to have ended sometime in the 1960s–-when the criteria of internationally ‘correct’ Spanish were dictated by the Real Academia Española, but the prestige of this institution has now sunk so low that its most solemn decrees are either ignored or only fitfully applied–witness the fate of the spelling reforms expounded in Nuevas normas de prosodia y ortografía which were made prescriptive in 1959 and are still in 1987 only selectively observed in print and are ignored or misunderstood by literate persons everywhere. The fact is that in Spanish ‘correctness’ is nowadays determined–as in most languages–by majority educated usage and taste, but consensus about educated usage is obviously elusive in a language spoken in twenty independent, widely scattered and sometimes mutually hostile countries.” “[I]t is above all the variety, vigour and rising prestige of Latin-American Spanish that complicates the task of compilers of dictionaries or grammars. Spanish is still obviously one language in the sense that anyone who knows it well can travel the Spanish-speaking world without excessive problems of intelligibility as far as written and educated spoken language is concerned. But at the level of detail, i.e. at the level at which advanced textbooks must work, Spanish is characterized by regional and national variations of vocabulary and to a much lesser extent syntax that can be very disconcerting, especially when it comes to trying to define for a foreign student what constitutes ‘correct’ Spanish.... Spain is no longer in any sense a literary, cultural or a linguistic center of the Hispanic world and its modern literature attracts little attention in Latin America. But no other Spanish-speaking country has taken over the place Spain once held, and there is now no single identifiable Hispanic cultural or linguistic centre but rather a number of competing, equally powerful and widely separated centres.”

Puerto Rican Regional Spanish: 'Rules' of pronunciation

It is a fact that when a Puerto Rican attempts to speak in non-regional ways, he or she is made fun of by the old saw, "Ay, ¡qué fisno!", where the s in "fisno" (real word is fino for English fine) is introduced in order to highlight how ridiculous the non-regionally enunciated words sound among present company. However, there are those of other countries who, in their attempt to make fun of the unorthodox Puerto Rican pronunciation, make themselves sound strange to Puerto Ricans listening to the fun-making. In making corrections, it has been necessary to point out that Puerto Rican enunciation is different, "pero tiene su ciencia" (but there is a science to it). Here is its science.

Orthographic Conventions Used: No accents will be written where they normally would not be written and will be written where they normally would. For example, vestido is written without an accent in standard Spanish. When contracted to vesti'o, no accent is written because the apostrophe is in place of the omitted d.

Contractions Past-tense verbs and adjectives that end in -do or -da (e.g., sabido, prestado, enojada) are contracted so that the d is omitted entirely (sabi'o, presta'o, enoja').

The final s sound (s or z) in most words is aspirated like the h in English, as if the word ended in Spanish j: Quizaj me vaya mañana. When the s sound is pronounced, it is usually to

The medial s sound is frequently