Mexican Spanish

Mexican Spanish is the variety of dialects and sociolects of the Spanish language spoken in Mexico and its bordering regions. Mexico has the world's largest number of Spanish speakers, more than double any other country. Spanish is spoken by over 99% of the population, being the mother tongue of 93.8%, and the second language of 5.4%.

Variation

Mexican Spanish has a great deal of internal variation and is not necessarily coterminous with the country of Mexico. The Spanish spoken in the southernmost state of Chiapas, bordering Guatemala, resembles the variety of Central American Spanish spoken in that country, where voseo is used. Meanwhile, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and later immigration led to a large number of Mexicans residing in what had become US territory, and many of their descendants have continued to speak Spanish.
Finally, the Spanish spoken in coastal areas often exhibits certain phonetic traits in common with Caribbean Spanish rather than with that of central Mexico, and the Spanish of the Yucatán Peninsula is quite distinct from other varieties. It should also be noted that there is great variation in intonation patterns from region to region within Mexico. For instance, the Spanish of northern Mexico, including the traditional Spanish of New Mexico, is characterized by its own distinct set of intonation patterns.
Regarding the evolution of the Spanish spoken in Mexico, the Swedish linguist Bertil Malmberg points out that in Central Mexican Spanish—unlike most varieties in the other Spanish-speaking countries—the vowels lose strength, while consonants are fully pronounced. Malmberg attributes this to a Nahuatl substratum, as part of a broader cultural phenomenon that preserves aspects of indigenous culture through place names of Nahuatl origin, statues that commemorate Aztec rulers, etc. The Mexican linguist Juan M. Lope Blanch, however, finds similar weakening of vowels in regions of several other Spanish-speaking countries; he also finds no similarity between the vowel behavior of Nahuatl and that of Central Mexican Spanish; and thirdly, he finds Nahuatl syllable structure no more complex than that of Spanish. Furthermore, Nahuatl is not alone as a possible influence, as there are currently more than 90 native languages spoken in Mexico and Nahuatl never spread across the entire territory of modern Mexico.

Phonology

Consonants

Affricates

Due to influence from indigenous languages, such as Nahuatl, Mexican Spanish has incorporated many words containing the sequences and, corresponding to the voiceless alveolar affricate and the voiceless alveolar lateral affricate, present in many indigenous languages of Mexico, as in the words tlapalería and coatzacoalquense .
Mexican Spanish always pronounces the and in such a sequence in the same syllable, a trait shared with the Spanish of the rest of Latin America, that of the Canary Islands, and the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, including Bilbao and Galicia. This includes words of Greek and Latin origin with such as and. In contrast, in most of Spain, the would form part of the previous syllable's coda, and be subject to weakening, as in,.
Some claim that in Mexican Spanish, the sequence is really a single phoneme, the same as the lateral affricate of Nahuatl. On the other hand, José Ignacio Hualde and Patricio Carrasco argue that is best analyzed as an onset cluster on the basis that Mexicans take the same amount of time to pronounce as they do to pronounce and. They predicted that if were a single segment, it would have been pronounced quicker than the other clusters.

Fricatives

In addition to the usual voiceless fricatives of other American Spanish dialects, Mexican Spanish also has the palatal sibilant, mostly in words from indigenous languages—especially place names. The, represented orthographically as, is commonly found in words of Nahuatl or Mayan origin, such as Metro Xola . The spelling can additionally represent the phoneme , as in México itself ; or, as in the place name Xochimilco—as well as the sequence, which is common to all varieties of Spanish. In many Nahuatl words in which originally represented, the pronunciation has changed to —e.g. Xalapa.
Regarding the pronunciation of the phoneme, the articulation in most of Mexico is velar, as in caja . However, in some dialects of southern Mexico, the normal articulation is glottal . Thus, in these dialects, México, Jalapa, and caja are respectively pronounced,, and.
In northwestern Mexico and rural Michoacan,, represented by, tends to be deaffricated to, a phonetic feature also typical of southwestern Andalusian Spanish dialects.
All varieties of Mexican Spanish are characterized by yeísmo: the letters and correspond to the same phoneme,. That phoneme, in most variants of Mexican Spanish, is pronounced as either a palatal fricative or an approximant in most cases, although after a pause it is instead realized as an affricate.
In the north and in rural Michoacan, is consistently rendered as an approximant and may even be elided when between vowels and in contact with or, as in gallina 'hen', silla 'chair', and sella 'seal'.
As in all American dialects of Spanish, Mexican Spanish has seseo, so is not distinguished from. Thus, casa 'house' and caza 'hunt' are homophones.
Present in most of the interior of Mexico is the preservation, or absence of debuccalization, of syllable-final. On the other hand, -weakening is very frequent on the Pacific and Caribbean coasts, and is also fairly frequent in northern and northwestern Mexico, and in parts of Oaxaca and the Yucatán peninsula. In all these regions, -weakening acts as a sociolinguistic marker, being more prevalent in rural areas and among the lower classes. The prevalence of a weakened syllable-final in so many peripheral areas of Mexico suggests that such weakening was at one point more prevalent in peripheral areas, but that the influence of Mexico City has led to the diffusion of a style of pronunciation without -weakening, especially among the urban middle classes.
-weakening on both the Pacific and the Gulf Coast was strengthened by influences from Andalusian, Canarian, and Caribbean Spanish dialects.
Also, the dialects spoken in rural Chihuahua, Sonora, and Sinaloa, like that of New Mexico, have developed aspiration of syllable-initial, as in words like pasar 'to pass' and señor 'sir'.
Despite the general lack of s-aspiration in the center of the country, is often elided before or, and the phrase buenas noches is often pronounced without the first.

Stops

There is a set of voiced obstruents—,,, and sometimes —which alternate between approximant and plosive allophones depending on the environment.
often becomes, especially in more rural speech, such that abuelo and bueno may be pronounced as agüelo and güeno. In addition, is often assimilated to.
Speakers from the Yucatán, especially men or those who are older, often pronounce the voiceless stops with aspiration.

Vowels

Like most Spanish dialects and varieties, Mexican Spanish has five vowels: close unrounded front, close rounded back, mid unrounded front, mid rounded back, and open unrounded.
Mexican Spanish, particularly that of central Mexico, features a high rate of reduction, which can involve shortening and centralization, devoicing, or both, and even elision of unstressed vowels, as in . This process is most frequent when a vowel is in contact with the phoneme, so that + vowel + is the construction when the vowel is most frequently affected. It can be the case that the words pesos, pesas, and peces are pronounced the same. The vowels are slightly less frequently reduced or eliminated in the constructions + vowel +, so that the words pastas, pastes, and pastos may also be pronounced the same.

Morphology

Mexican Spanish does not use voseo outside some parts of Chiapas. The traditional familiar second person plural pronoun vosotros—in colloquial use only in Spain—is found in Mexico only in certain archaic texts and ceremonial language. However, since it is used in many Spanish-language Bibles throughout the country, most Mexicans are familiar with the form and understand it. An instance of it is found in the national anthem, which all Mexicans learn to sing: Mexicanos, al grito de guerra / el acero aprestad y el bridón.
Mexicans tend to use the polite personal pronoun usted in the majority of social situations, especially in Northern Mexico. In the north, children even address their parents with usted.
In rural areas of Sonora, Chihuahua, Durango, Jalisco, Guanajuato, and Tlaxcala, many people use a number of distinct non-standard morphological forms: second person preterite verb forms ending in -ates, ites, instead of -aste, iste; imperfect forms such as traiba, creiba, instead of traía, creía ; merging -ir and -er verb conjugations, such as using vivemos, instead of vivimos ; non-standard forms, such as haiga, with non-standard, also used in words such as creigo, instead creo ; an accent shift in the first person plural subjunctive forms, such as váyamos, instead of vayamos ; and a shift from -mos to -nos in proparoxytonic third person singular verb forms, such as cantaríanos, instead of cantaríamos. These same verb forms are also found in the traditional Spanish of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado.

Suffixes

Central Mexico is noted for the frequent use of diminutive suffixes with many nouns, adverbs, and adjectives, even where no semantic diminution of size or intensity is implied. Most frequent is the -ito/ita suffix, which replaces the final vowel on words that have one. Words ending with -n use the suffix -cito/cita. Use of the diminutive does not necessarily denote small size, but rather often implies an affectionate attitude; thus one may speak of "una casita grande".
When the diminutive suffix is applied to an adjective, often a near-equivalent idea can be expressed in English by "nice and ". So, for example, a mattress described as blandito might be "nice and soft", while calling it blando might be heard to mean "too soft".
In some regions of Mexico, the diminutive suffix -ito is also used to form affectives to express politeness or submission, and is attached to names denoting affection. In the northern parts of the country, the suffix -ito is often replaced in informal situations by -illo.
Frequent use of the diminutive is found across all socioeconomic classes, but its "excessive" use is commonly associated with lower-class speech.
The augmentative suffix -ote is typically used in Mexico to make nouns larger, more powerful, etc. For example, the word camión, in Mexico, means bus; the suffixed form camionzote means "big or long bus". It can be repeated just as in the case of the suffixes -ito and -ísimo; therefore camionzotototote means very, very, very big bus.
The suffix -uco or -ucho and its feminine counterparts -uca and -ucha respectively, are used as a disparaging form of a noun; for example, the word casa, meaning "house", can be modified with that suffix to change the word's meaning to make it disparaging, and sometimes offensive; so the word casucha often refers to a shanty, hut or hovel. The word madera can take the suffix -uca to mean "rotten, ugly wood".
Other suffixes include, but are not limited to: -azo as in carrazo, which refers to a very impressive car such as a Ferrari or Mercedes-Benz; -ón, for example narizón, meaning "big-nosed", or patona, a female with large feet.