Spain vs Argentina Olympic Games Live Football Score 28 Jul 2021

With over 40 million inhabitants each, Spain and Argentina are two of the most populous Spanish-speaking countries in the world. Their capitals — Madrid and Buenos Aires, respectively — are bustling metropolitan hubs, rich in history and tradition. But despite having the same official language, the two cities are quite different, in terms of both culture and geography — they’re over 10,000 kilometers apart (that’s about 6,200 miles, for our American readers).

As a result, the Spanish spoken in Madrid (known as ‘Castilian Spanish’) and Buenos Aires (called ‘Rioplatense Spanish’) is quite distinct — in terms of pronunciation, vocabulary, and even grammar

Madrid: The most striking and well-known aspect of Castilian Spanish is called distinción, which refers to the pronunciation of the letters “z” and “c”. In Castilian Spanish, when a word contains a “z” before any vowel, or a “c” before an “e” or “i”, it is pronounced not like “s” in “sing”, but rather like “th” in “thing”. Therefore, the words “cinco” and “zorro” are pronounced like “thinco” and “thorro”, respectively.

Buenos Aires: In Buenos Aires, the letters “z” and “c” sound like “s”: Rioplatense Spanish doesn’t ever alternate the sounds “s” and “th” (in fact, the “th” sound doesn’t even exist in the language). However, famously, Rioplatense Spanish differs from other varieties of Spanish in its pronunciation of the letters “ll” and “y”. While other Spanish dialect pronounce these letters like the letter “y” in English, Rioplatense Spanish pronounces them as a “zh” sound. Therefore, “yo” sounds like “zho”, and “llamar” sounds like “zhamar”.

Madrid: The most notable grammatical feature of Castilian Spanish is its use of the second-person plural pronoun “vosotros”, which comes with its own set of conjugations. In other varieties of Spanish, the second-person plural pronoun (“you guys” or “y’all”, in English) is “ustedes”, and it takes the same form as the third-person plural pronouns “ellos” and “ellas”.

Some differences between Spanish in Spain and Argentina

“Vosotros”, on the other hand, has distinct conjugations, which end in -áis, éis, or -is, depending on the base verb. So whereas other dialects of Spanish would say “ustedes están”, speakers of Castilian Spanish would say “vosotros estáis”.