- Professor, there is often news in the media about conflicts that raises the accent of a certain character or about how good or bad is such or that accent of Spanish, so we are very interested in this topic. But let's start at the beginning: what exactly is the accent?

The word accent in linguistics has two main meanings, one more strictly linguistic and one more social. In the first sense, the accent is a prosodic trait that consists of the greater or lesser intensity with which a syllable is emitted and serves to differentiate between the accented words from the unaccented words and, within the accentuated words, words stressed on the last, the penultimate, and the antepenultimate syllable.

In the social sense, the accent refers to certain pronunciation marks that allow to recognize the geographical origin of a speaker. These characteristics correspond to some phonic traits, such as the pronunciation of certain sounds, but above all relate to intonation, the melody of speech, the cadence and the specific rhythm that each dialect has. In this way, we can talk about Andalusian accent, Canary accent, Madrid accent, Argentine accent, Mexican accent or Cuban accent, to give just a few examples.

- Do we all have an accent? How can we know or differentiate the accent we use?

The accent is an intrinsic feature of a person's language and is acquired at the same time as the mother tongue is acquired, so we all have an accent, no one lacks an accent or, in other words, no one speaks with a 'neutral accent'. What happens is that, as I have said on some other occasion, with the accent occurs as with certain characteristics, such as personal smell, which we find difficult to recognize it in ourselves and yet we perceive it easily in others.

- What is the accent for? Do you have any social or communicative functions?

It is an unresolved issue yet, but it seems that one of the main functions of the accent is to allow us to identify quickly as members of a social group. Usually, we talk as those of our environment speaks and we feel part of the group. The accent, in this sense, is a powerful individual and group identity generator. By the accent we can quickly determine whether someone speaks like us or not and therefore allows us to know quickly whether or not they are part of our speaking community. And this has important consequences for determining the extent to which language behaviors can be required, but also social.

- But are all accents the same or are there better accents and worse accents? 

Florentino Paredes

The main problem is that you often get confused how a person talks to what that person is like. If in a television series, for example, staff who perform certain low professions on the social scale always show up speaking with a certain accent (think, for example, raised always speaking with an Andalusian accent), we are reproducing a stereotype, according to which those who speak with that accent can only occupy those professions or trades. The immediate consequence is that we are actually putting difficulties or impediments to these people so that they can rise socially.

One of the tasks of sociolinguists and language teachers is to eliminate false beliefs and negative stereotypes created in relation to languages and accents. It should also be noted that within each dialect speakers can have a more or less marked accent, and that only the most marked accents are those that make it difficult to communicate with speakers from other geographical origins. And what is shown is that culture and education contribute to leveling differences in the pronunciation of Spanish speakers. In fact, educated Spanish speakers, whatever their origin, have no substantial divergences in the way they pronounce.

That´s why we can say that there is no better accent than another, in the geographical sense: Spanish is not spoken better in one territory than in another. That is, in each area are speakers who pay more care to their language and pronunciation to achieve better communication. These speakers are also the ones who tend to have the greatest social prestige, so it´s usually those who are linguistically imitated. In short, there´s no place where Spanish is better spoken than in another, but everywhere there are speakers who speak better than others because they communicate better.

- Let us now focus on the Autonomous Community of Madrid, where anyone can see that there are many accents. What do you think is due to this variety?

The diversity of accents take place because people come from different places and even speak different languages. Madrid has historically been a migration territory for people from the two Castiles and other areas of Spain and is currently welcoming many immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries and from other backgrounds. Therefore, in the capital, we see more than in other areas what sociolinguists call the processes of linguistic accommodation: speakers from different backgrounds tend to make their linguistic uses similar, usually favoring common characteristics and discarding different ones, thus creating a new, common and shared variety. Over time, this new variety is what children learn from parents and help to maintain it, as a mark of their own identity.

- How has technology influenced accent diversification? And television or audio-visual media?

The language is constantly changing. Technology and the mass media has helped in this leveling process that I have just talked about, to the extent that they have helped to disseminate different ways of pronouncing Spanish. A few decades ago it was highly unlikely that an alcalaíno, for example, would hear a Venezuelan, an Ecuadorian or a Chilean speak. Today, however, we often receive sound messages, videos or recordings from anywhere in the Spanish-speaking world. This exposure to the way other Spanish speakers pronounce, to other accents, contributes to creating attitudes that, when they become frequent or habitual, usually end up being favorable.

Publicado en: Inglés