[sam537]

The lowest of the low? Based on consonant pronunciation? How can you extract a value judgment from how someone speaks?

[fcatalan]

There's a bit of "accentism" in Spain. Speaking with a southern accent will (wrongly) mark you as "lazy", "uncultured" or "unsophisticated" to some people.

I was born in Castile, so I usually speak "accentless" standard Spanish, but my mother comes from Extremadura, just a couple hours drive to the south, and when I speak to her I involuntarily switch to the extremaduran accent. I don't notice it but other people hearing me for the first time are shocked by the sudden switch.

Extremaduran accent has the same aspirated x and s mentioned in the article, so for "This is Extremadura" I'll tend to say "Ehto é Ehtremaura" to my mother and "Esto es Extremadura" to other people. Another curiosity is that many of the original "conquistadores" (Cortés, Pizarro) hailed from Extremadura.

[ttfkam]

I have never heard of Castilian Spanish referred to as "accentless" before.

The lisp always sounds odd to me. That and vosotros. The vast majority of Spanish speakers worldwide use neither.

[rocketbop]

Slightly off topic but your reference to being accentless reminds me of a time as a 14 year old visiting my American cousins for Ireland.

My slightly younger cousin’s friend found the way I pronounced things as well as some of my vocabulary to be very funny. When I pointed out that he also had an accent he almost almost wet himself with laughter, so absurd was the idea to him that both of us had accents rather than the one of us who didn’t sound American.

[ChainOfFools]

I've noticed strong shades of this in various dialects of Caribbean Spanish too; I didn't know there was a name for it much less a possibly correlated colonial origin.

[the_only_law]

> How can you extract a value judgment from how someone speaks?

I mean it’s not exactly uncommon. I have the luck of having a southern U.S. accent and I’ve been told (mostly by people from outside the US in fairness) that they were surprised I wasn’t a raging racist.

[ithkuil]

Sadly that's what humans do and have done since forever and it is an important driving factor in language evolution

[jcranmer]

It's using pronunciation to infer regional/class origins, and it's widespread in most languages. See for example southern accents in American English, which can be associated with rednecks.

[b800h]

Via a class system. US movies imply you have the same thing over there.

[jfengel]

Every language group has a hierarchy of accents, often roughly corresponding to wealth. There is usually a prestige accent used by the wealthy, and which the upper classes mimic. And everyone looks down on rural people, marked by their accent.

It's worse in some places than others but it's practically universal.

[jghn]

Yes. It's not unlike how people assume someone with a rural/southern US accent is dumb.

[Turing_Machine]

Ask anyone who has a "hillbilly" accent how they're treated by "educated" people.

[mejutoco]

Interestingly, I have often seen in movies with hillbilly characters dubbed to Spanish, their accent is dubbed in andalusian accent. I alway found it quite offensive.

[uncletaco]

When you get away from the coasts and start dealing with domestic companies you'll start to find many people in those spaces will exaggerate their regional accents. A guy from Chicago wants you to know you're dealing with a "real" Chicagoan. A guy working out of Port Fourchon might really want you to believe they just rose from the swamp to take your phone call.