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by LAC-Tech 724 days ago
If you want to be more widely understood, it's better to sound more like the King of England than whatever your local variety is.

I tone down my (English language) accent when speaking to foreigners all the time. The point is to be understood.

I'm toning it down right now in this message. I want to be clear to a wider audience, not folksy.

So is Spain really telling other people the way they speak is "wrong", or is there simply a prestige accent, best utilised for international communication so the maximum amount of people can understand?

1 comments

No, it has nothing to do with accent (phonetic). It's entirely language. They have a long history of "forbidding" words that are "real or not real spanish".

And by the way, counterintuitively, languages have NOT evolved to be better understood, but on the contrary, to "separate" or create cohesion in smaller groups.

"Spain" is not forbidding anything, the RAE [1] and the ASALE [2] are working together in keeping a common tongue. Don't allow some chauvinistic view to cloud your judgement.

[1] https://www.rae.es/

[2] https://www.asale.org/

Eg. "La red" vs "Internet" back in the late 90s/early 2000s.

Guess which word took precedence?