Venezuelan Spanish, known locally as castellano venezolano or espanol venezolano, is the regional variety of Spanish spoken in Venezuela, where it is the predominant language of about 29.8 million native speakers as of 2014. It descends from the Spanish brought by colonists from Galicia, the Basque Country, Andalusia, and especially the Canary Islands, whose influence was so strong that Canarian and Venezolano accents can sound indistinguishable to other Spanish speakers, and later Italian, Portuguese, and German immigration added further influence. Its phonetic features include seseo, the merging of the sounds represented by z and s, yeismo, the merging of the sounds represented by ll and y, the weakening of s at the end of syllables, and the shift of syllable final n to a velar sound. The dialect has also absorbed vocabulary from indigenous languages, from African languages carried by the slave trade, and from the languages of later European immigrants. Distinct subdialects are recognized within the country, including Andean, Central, Llanero, and Zulian varieties, each shaped by its own geography and settlement history.
Facts
RegionSpoken in Venezuela; introduced by colonists mostly from Galicia, the Basque Country, Andalusia and the Canary Islands, the last of which has been the most fundamental influence on modern Venezuelan Spanish. 1 Speaker CommunityThe second-person singular informal pronoun is usually tu, as in most of Latin America and Spain, but in Zulia and parts of Falcon and Trujillo speakers instead use vos (voseo), a community-specific feature not shared with most of the rest of the country. 1 Distinguishing FeaturesZulian voseo is diptongado, meaning its verb conjugation preserves the diphthongs of the historical vos conjugation (vos sois, vos estais), unlike the monophthongized forms found in Rioplatense Spanish (vos sos, vos estas). 1 Classification
Variety Kind Sources
1. Wikipedia: Venezuelan Spanish
Wikimedia FoundationLead section
Most of them were from Galicia, Basque Country, Andalusia, or the Canary Islands. The last has been the most fundamental influence on modern Venezuelan Spanish, and Canarian and Venezuelan accents may even be indistinguishable to other Spanish-speakers.
Features section
Zulian voseo is diptongado: conjugation preserves the diphthongs of the historical vos conjugation, which have had monophthongization in Rioplatense. The Zulian forms are thus the same as those in Spain for the second-person plural vosotros): instead of tú eres, tú estás, Zulian has vos sois, vos estáis
Variety kind, Venezuelan Spanish entity page
Venezuelan Spanish, known locally as castellano venezolano or espanol venezolano, is the regional variety of Spanish spoken in Venezuela, where it is the predominant language of about 29.8 million native speakers as of 2014.
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