Why does mexico speak spanish

Because of this, in , King Charles IV ordered that all official business had to be conducted in Spanish. After Mexico gained independence, indigenous languages didn't enjoy the revival that tagalog did in the Philippines. The politicians of the early Republic shared many of the same prejudices against Amerindian language and culture with the Spaniards.

Throughout most of the 19th century and the start of the 20th Century, most schools punished children from rural villages for using indigenous languages in class.

Native Nahuatl and Zapotec speakers were also discriminated against due to their accent. It wasn't until the late 20th Century that the tide turned, but by then, many native languages had become extinct. Approximately six million Mexicans still speak one of 68 indigenous languages. Nahuatl is still spoken by over a million people.

Over , also speak Yucatec, Maya and Zapotec. However, many others have very few speakers and are in danger of disappearing altogether. That being said, attitudes are changing at last. The Mexican government is now investing heavily in preserving these languages, tasking linguists with recording their vocabularies. Meanwhile, the speakers themselves are done with being ashamed, and many are eager to fight to see indigenous languages used again.

For example, check out this this hip hop artist from Juchitan who raps in Zapotec:. Often, it feels hard to connect with the culture of a foreign country from afar. It's not impossible, though. We must get rid of the idea that a homogeneous Spanish arrived. What came [to Mexico] was Spanish with many dialects influenced by Andalusia and the Caribbean. What were you referring to? Totally, we are heirs of the sea. But not only Mexico, much of America was also molded by the sea. Imagine that very intimate coexistence [on the ships that traveled to America], in unimaginable conditions, with horrific diarrhea.

These very diverse dialects were coexisting in order to survive. These voyages lasted four to five months, and people adopted and added to the maritime lexicon. For example, the word zafarrancho [havoc, mess] is a maritime word: what the passengers did was to establish their rancho [ranch], the place to store their trunks.

And if they were going to be shipwrecked, or there was an enemy ship, they had to break up the rancho to level the ship. When you arrive in a new place, you have to dominate it, get to know it, and part of that mechanism of appropriation is to name things.

So what did the Spaniards do? The first thing they did was to appropriate and name reality. There were several different strategies. One was to name things by what they heard: they began to incorporate indigenous words into Spanish.

The proof that they did not always hear the same thing is that sometimes there are six, seven or eight spellings for the same word. This is a sign that in the indigenous languages — Nahuatl, Mayan, Mixtec, Zapotec — there was already variation. A fundamental principle of the survival of the Spaniards was naming things because they had to describe them for the king in the chronicles they wrote home.

When writing about what they had done, the very rich world of the Americas appears, full of words from indigenous languages: Chalchihuite , pulque , tomato, chocolate, hundreds of words.

So pimiento [pepper], for example, is a Latin word, from pigmentum, but chili peppers are from the Americas. It was renamed with a Latin word because they did not know what to call it. There is a whole dispute between pigmentum, chili , and aji. All describe and refer to the many species of peppers that exist in the Americas. You have questioned whether Spanish in Mexico should be understood as an imposition. Yes, from the very beginning. A conquering language can be recognized as such because it is restricted to specific uses: Spanish was used for commerce, for administration and for religion.

But some Spaniards learned Nahuatl. Take a look at this video to hear examples of Mexican Spanish accents. According to statistics, 6. See the table on the right. And be sure to check out these other articles about How to Speak Spanish. About Us.

Contact Us. The Spanish spoken in Mexico has developed with a separate set of influences from European Spanish but remains merely a slightly different version and not a distinct language.

The official language of Mexico is Spanish, and the differences between the official Spanish spoken in Mexico and the European Spanish spoken across the ocean in Spain is small. A good comparison is American and British English; both clearly the same language, but with a large number of small differences which have only a limited ability to confound meaning.

There are differences in pronunciation, vocabulary, and other nuances , but essentially the official Spanish in Mexico is the same as the Spanish in Spain and throughout most of the world.

It has a distinctly Mexican flavor to it today, of course, but it hardly counts as a separate dialect or language on its own. The chief difference between Mexican Spanish and European Spanish — or Spanish Spanish, if you will — is in the influence of the languages that existed in the Aztec empire at the time of the Spanish conquest in the 16th century.