I think the chart is saying less about differences relative to Spanish Spanish and more about each regional dialect relative to the others.
In the table, the countries appear to be ordered (horizontally as well as vertically) by distance relative to Spain. Assuming there's nothing (like an ocean) to prevent the diffusion and evolution of language, given any cross-location in the grid, the cells nearest should theoretically have little to no gradient.
That's clearly not the case with Chile and isolation due to the Andes seems like a reasonable cause.
Columbia and Costa Rica also exhibit this effect, though, and I'm not sure why. FARC? They are separated by Panama and the PCZ; has the canal had an effect of preserving Panama's cultural ties relative to other countries at the expensive of those of CO/CR?
I’m pretty sure that’s the case for every country in the world.
Aside from that, judge for yourself: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombian_Spanish
If you want to understand Spanish this is the best resource available
Not all people in this academy descend from the Borbons. Not all people there are from Spain. All are voted by their peers based in their perceived merits. Is a meritocracy, not a monarchy.
Some people appreciate the fact that there are experts on Spanish language trying to help everybody. Other will keep saying the equivalent to "Experts thing that are better than me" or "Death to conquerors. Mine is better, Murica!!". Everybody has their own choice, but the reward is ending with a language that nobody will understand. A very silly prize.
Any centralized institution that is in charge of overseeing a large and diverse number of countries that have evolved spanish over the past ~400 years is, in my eyes, set to fail.
Now, I do use RAE all the time to check definitions, but I see it as a "descriptive" body, in charge of creating some definitions. But even some of those definitions have to be "scrutinized" and can't be literally and blindly trusted. For example, check the definition of "gitano", which has a clear pejorative connotation. That is not wrong, is just the reality of how the "spanish speaking world" expresses itself. But should you take that definition by heart? I don't think so.
This is a clear example of "The Cathedral vs the Bazaar", as in Open Source vs privative software. I'm a hacker, I prefer a bazaar to a single institution dictating how we should talk..
About your "neologisms", no they are calcos or loan translations [3], they are not neologisms. They would be neologisms if they were new words, not copy of words from other languages.
I tone down my (English language) accent when speaking to foreigners all the time. The point is to be understood.
I'm toning it down right now in this message. I want to be clear to a wider audience, not folksy.
So is Spain really telling other people the way they speak is "wrong", or is there simply a prestige accent, best utilised for international communication so the maximum amount of people can understand?
And by the way, counterintuitively, languages have NOT evolved to be better understood, but on the contrary, to "separate" or create cohesion in smaller groups.
Guess which word took precedence?
[1] https://www.asale.org/academias/academia-argentina-de-letras
Andalusians will change naturally to a more standard and fully intelligible Spanish when talking with somebody from Zaragoza (or even with Andalusian people that use a different accent). And any educated person can write fully understandable standard Spanish.
Also, Spain Spanish is not necessarily "Standard" (Castilian) Spanish.
To desert, v, stress on the second syllable, means to leave/abandon something.
Desert, n, stress on the second syllable, is what you deserve "he got his just deserts"
Dessert, n, stress on the second syllable, is a sweet course of a meal that follows the main course. It has an extra s because of its etymology not its pronunciation.
I'm quite sure this mess was designed to be as confusing as possible.
I’ll just say: kuchen, cachái.
Which other modern language uses cachái, with the same spelling, in the same context as Chile?
> I can't recall any other German loanwords aside from kuchen.
Still influenced the dialect, didn’t it?
> Still influenced the dialect, didn’t it?
A few food names do not qualify as "influenced the dialect" for me. Mapudungun did influence the Chilean dialect, but German did not. I generally find the "German influence in the south" very exaggarated and a cover-up for the fact that the primary influences in the south have always come from Mapuche culture.
But there's a broad veneration of Germans and other Europeans, combined with a disdain towards indigenous peoples and their cultures, so the "German South" myth withstands, along with that one photo of Puerto Varas taken from the right angle to make it look like a German town.
This is correct. Case in point: Beamer.
> A few food names do not qualify as "influenced the dialect" for me.
For you. That doesn’t change the fact that the term has widespread use all over the national territory.
> Mapudungun did influence the Chilean dialect
If you want to stress the point, I’d additionally argue that a larger amount of indigenous-derived terms (including several words for vegetables) came from the Quechua. Although, according to your own set of criteria, a few food names would not qualify.
Your conclusion is then that Chilean Spanish has no Quechua language influence in any serious way?
> the only linguistic legacy of Germans in Chile are kuchen, strudel, and some weird last names used as street names
You forgot bocha, polca, and murra.
> murra
It's mora down here.
It's hard to understand some Chilean speakers but that's because they don't modulate their voice and cut or join words. But grammatically they are "correct".
There is a lot of Chilean slang and it's almost universally understood from north to south. But people are aware of it, it's usually not used at work. And then there are a lot of words which are just different, just about every fruit has a different name.
> It’s the farthest region from Spain, so the least communicated to the rest of the empire, and hence the one that drifted the most from the homeland.
Er... if you look at the table (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_...), Chile has quite a lot of red, but actually its Spanish is closer to the Spanish from Spain than that of other South American countries. So it looks like those have drifted further from "standard" Spanish, while Chile hasn't as much?