What is the best Spanish?
In the first class, students ask these questions most often: Which Spanish are you going to teach me? And I usually answer “what?” Yes, I mean are you going to teach me Spanish from Spain, Spanish from Mexico or Spanish from Latin America? What’s the best kind of Spanish to learn?
People are concerned with learning a language that can be useful in most situations. Even some instructors or language teachers help to spread the myth that there is a “best Spanish”. Obviously taking their own “Spanish” as a reference and disqualifying the Spanish spoken in other countries.
Students’ preoccupation is understandable but it doesn’t have much basis. Let’s make some distinctions and let’s analyze the facts in depth in order to arrive at our own conclusions.
Spanish, compared to other languages, has a special institution that is in charge of making the rules and standardizing its use. It’s known as “La real academia de la lengua española”, which works in coordination with 21 regional academies that belong to each Spanish speaking country. These academies constantly agree and review rules for the Standard Spanish, and these are the rules that we learn in our countries.
Obviously, there are some linguistic variants that obey to diverse social or even economic factors; however, the Standard form remains the same because it is spread through the education systems of each country and most population knows it and use it every day.
Due to this simplification of norms, we can understand each other without any problem, using the standard, of course, whenever we are not using any type of local slang that is only understood and used by people who belongs to certain social groups and contexts.
The slang or street Spanish, are language games that are only useful in a determined situation, place, or specific context.
Learning this type of variants could be sometimes very fun, but focusing on or worrying about these local changes it is not useful, especially if you are a beginner.
So always remember that Spanish is only one.That is, it is only one language with different accents and minimal variations in its structure. And be sure that those variations can be easily assimilated without problems if you master the standard.
Therefore, the Standard Spanish can be perfectly taught by any language instructor who masters and has the right knowledge about how its own language works in depth, regardless of what his or her native country or accent is.
So keep moving forward and stop worrying about “the best Spanish” issue!
June 16, 2017
