Omniglot - the blog

Language quiz

Simon on 04 Mar 2007

Language and Spanish and Quiz questions | Comments (14)

14 Responses to “Language quiz”

1. Colm on 04 Mar 2007 at 6:27 pm #

   They say when you dont know you just guess! :-)

   1) Porto Rico
   2) Spain
   3) Boliva
   4) Cuba
   5) Ecuador

2. JD on 04 Mar 2007 at 7:57 pm #

   1) Spain
   2) Guatemala
   3) Peru
   4)Argentina
   5) Mexico

   I have to say this was quite hard!

3. Osman on 04 Mar 2007 at 9:24 pm #

   I really wonder who will know the answer correctly. Can you also provide your guess’ reasons? if you say 4 is Spain, why do you think so? A word, a sentence, way of pronunciation? If you share your reasons, that would help us a lot :-)

   All i can say that Argentina, Mexico and Spain are in the list. I don’t know exactly why but they sound closer to me. I haven’t heard the other Spanish accents except Colombia. But i am sooo newbie to match them yet!

4. Mike on 04 Mar 2007 at 11:03 pm #

   Wow! For speaking Spanish since age 10, this was a lot harder than I thought it’d be.
   1 - Spain 99% positive. The c’s and z’s pronounced as /th/ are dead give-aways.
   2 - No idea, random guess of Mexico.
   3 - An educated guess of Argentina, simply because of the melody of the speaker.
   4 - A slightly less educated guess of Peru, because I once befriended this old Peruvian lady who sounded a lot like the guy talking in this recording, but the only phonetic clues I really heard were /g,d,b/ reduction which is super common in all dialects of Spanish
   5 - No idea - Random guess of Venezuela.

5. Mike on 04 Mar 2007 at 11:25 pm #

   I’d be curious for a French quiz like this. I don’t mean lecture, but especially with Spanish (less for French, and not so with English) and probably many languages, regional accents get white-washed to an official standard in a lot of news broadcasts and the like. For instance in Quebec, on Radio-Canada, 4 times out of 5 it’s hard to tell the difference if someone’s French or Quebecois. Of course if you go up to Joe Shmoe on the street, it slaps you pretty hard one way or the other. Perhaps some lexical differences can be heard on the news, but most of the phonological characteristics of Quebecois disappear or are severely reduced on official broadcasting.

6. Lektu on 05 Mar 2007 at 1:18 am #

   1.- Spain (100% sure; I’m a spaniard)
   2.- Chile?
   3.- Argentina or Uruguay
   4.- Venezuela?
   5.- Mexico

7. Dennison on 05 Mar 2007 at 2:18 am #

   The only one I’m pretty confident about answering is number 1, which is Spain, is it not?

   I remember a couple of years ago, my friend was telling me about her trip to Spain. She mentioned that they pronounce Barcelona as “BAR-theh-LO-na”–the c’s and z’s pronounced as /th/, as Mike noted above. I’m kinda pleased that it stuck with me. Heh..

8. Simon on 05 Mar 2007 at 2:41 pm #

   Here are the answers

   Recording 1
   Country: Spain
   Radio Station: Onda Cero (Madrid)

   Recording 2
   Country: Mexico
   Radio Station: RN96.5 (Veracruz)

   Recording 3
   Country: Argentina
   Radio Station: Continental 590 AM

   Recording 4
   Country: Paraguay
   Radio Station: Radio Ñandutí (Asunción)

   Recording 5
   Country: Cuba
   Radio Station: Radio Progreso (Havana)

9. BnB on 06 Mar 2007 at 5:41 am #

   I was listening for the swallowed s’es of Cuba and didn’t hear them… the last one surprises me… Even though I didn’t log in, I got the first 3 right anyway…

10. Evans Knight on 07 Mar 2007 at 12:59 am #

    i agree with BnB…I would never have guessed that that was Cuban. I spend about 33% of my time with cuban spanish speakers, and they sound nothing like that.

11. James on 06 Apr 2007 at 2:09 pm #

    that WAS hard, 1 was easy though (I initially lived in Spain to learn Spanish). the rest threw me.
    2 was clearly central american, but I was not sure from where
    3 The concerje in my building (I live in chile) is from argentina and sounds nothing like this. You could have given us a few ll s which is the dead give away for argentina/Uraguay.
    4 I should have got this as one of my students is from Paraguay and the lilt is very obvious. A few more ´gringo´ r´s would have made it easier. Paraguayans tend not to have a trilled r
    5 Still surprised to hear that this was cuban, though again it was some sort of central american spanish.

    re 3 and 5 esp they did have radio voices, which is to say that they were speaking a fairly neutral spanish. If you had got some phone ins that would hvae been much more revealing.

    Please do another one! I love this sort of thing

    james

12. Bilingual Blogger on 25 Mar 2008 at 1:39 am #

    This was a fun pop quiz! I like how you slipped in an audio sample from Paraguay…probably one of the last places most people would’ve even thought about.

    Any plans to reprise this quiz with new accent samples from around the Spanish-speaking world?

13. Simon on 25 Mar 2008 at 4:07 pm #

    Bilingual Blogger - I am planning to do more quizzes like this for Spanish and other languages. Finding suitable recordings isn’t always easy though.

14. Damian on 17 May 2008 at 1:39 am #

    Simon,

    I’m an Irish man living in Miami and speak spanish daily pretty well. I KNOW how the cuban accent sounds and that commentator’s accent is not your typical cuban accent from Havana. Eastern Cuba sounds very different ..I wonder was he from there. I live with Cubans and hear it all the time. Just listen to Radio Mambi…..now THERE’S the real thing.