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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

> 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".

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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.

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