Venezuelan Spanish

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.