Spain: 2019 FIBA Basketball World Champs

Spain has captured the FIBA Basketball World Cup championship title in Beijing against one of the best teams in the world: Argentina. Surely the players of both teams exchanged more than words during the most disputed moments of the match.  Despite the distance and differences in both pronunciation and vocabulary between the Spanish of Spain and Spanish of Argentina, it is certain that they understood one another perfectly. But what are these differences?

The main difference between the two variants, and the one that most attracts attention to speakers on both sides is pronunciation. For example, while the Spaniards pronounce the sound /θ/ before –ce, -ci, -za, -zo, and –zu; Argentines use the Latin American common /s/ (although this is also used in the southern part of Spain, especially in the region of Andalusia and Murcia). Another very notable difference has to do with the tone and cadence in pronunciation: the Argentine usually has a slightly higher tone, which leads to fun (and frustrated) attempts by many Spaniards to imitate the Argentine accent.

Likewise, verbal conjugation and second-person pronouns differ between Spanish and Argentine: the "tú tienes" (you have) in Spanish becomes "vos tenés" in Argentina, and the Argentine "ustedes dicen" (you say) becomes "vosotros decís" when one moves to the old continent.

Where there may be some confusion, it is usually around those words which exist in one of the variants, but not in the other. For example, "remera" (T-shirt) in Argentine is "camiseta" in Spain. However, other words have managed to penetrate enough in the sister country, so that a Spaniard understand exactly what a “quilombo” (mess) or a “celular” (mobile phone) is in the same way that an Argentine understands what a “coche” (car) or a “ordenador” (computer) is.

However, despite the small differences between the two variants, the players of both basketball teams joined in celebration over a “birra” (beer), a word that is neither of Spanish nor Argentine origin, but Italian; nonetheless, both surely understood and happily participated.

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