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There literally is a standard Spanish, no? I understand it to be based on Castilian. However I understand your point that even within the country of Spain there are many dialects which diverge from "standard".

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> There literally is a standard Spanish, no?

Not really. Just like English, the standard variety in each country is considered equally "standard".

> I understand it to be based on Castilian.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. As far as I know Castilian is just a synonym for the Spanish language (as opposed to other languages of Spain e.g. Catalan). So the variety spoken in Guatemala and the one in Tenerife are equally "Castilian".

No, it's not like English. There is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Spanish. It is maintained by the: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Spanish_Academy. In practice, I'm not sure what the impact is. I'm not a native Spanish speaker. But Spanish is not like English in regard to prescriptive norms.

Spanish native here, confirming that RSA is the institution that sets the language standard.

But, people always deviate from it, though in my experience in word meanings and pronunciation, never in grammar to a degree that it become intelligible to another Spanish speaker.

The toughest film to listen to for me was "The rose seller"[1] (1998), took me like 10m to get my ear accustomed to their pronunciation.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASrxQCuVT-U

The paisa accent is very hard, even for us non-paisa colombians - not only for its colloquialisms but for its cadence.

So is the Andalusian accent from a Northern Spaniard like me, it's close to the prosody and speech of the US Southern accent. The first 20 minutes understanding Risitas were pure hell. But you get used to it in a few days. It's like some American trying to understand the Scott/Welsh (can't remember now) sheperd not exposed to it. I'm pretty sure they could be used to it in less time than a week.

To my non-roman ear it sounds a little like Italian.

There's "neutral" spanish, but it's less of a formal standard and more of a rough subset that people recongnize it's generally understandable to most people

It being so artificial means that it doesn't fit anywhere, even it if's becoming more common (Kids are growing up listening to Media dubbed to it, so it's not weird seing a Child "speak like a cartoon" for a while until their local dialect kicks in)

It is what I usually call the "TV" or "media" standard. Same in french, the french language you listen on TV is very uncommon if you actually talk to french people from different areas of France and it is not even common in Paris.

The differences between Spanish "dialects" are overstated IMO and closer to accents. No two Spanish accents are as different as the dialects of Arabic or dialects of Chinese are from each other. People will share anecdotes about not being able to understand different words(like straw, car, computer) but the underlying grammar is the same in all varieties. Im natively fluent in both English(US) and Spanish and I find English accents way harder to understand than Spanish ones. The only time Ive felt completely clueless listening to English was talking to a Scottish man.

The royal Academy of Spanish has the mission of promoting language unity, the American vocabulary is huge so a lot of words are really puzzling for people in other countries, but there is a common root that can be used.

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