Do you speak Castilian Spanish?

"My parents taught me Castilian Spanish,"  I heard someone in El Paso, Texas say recently.  How strange, I thought.   To me,  the term Castilian Spanish conjures up images of the dialect of Spanish spoken in northern and central Spain and its capital, Madrid.  Why in the world would you want to learn that dialect in the American Southwest, where we have our own dialect of Spanish? Upon further consideration, I realized what the speaker probably meant by Castilian Spanish. She was using 'Castilian' as shorthand for 'correct'.  Ah, the plot thickens!

Castilian Spanish has a variety of meanings and connotations.  Viewed as one of many dialects of Spanish, it  has a distinctive pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. One of the most easily recognized characteristics is the pronunciation of the letter 'z' before all vowels and the letter 'c' before 'e' or 'i' (the sound of the 'th' of 'think' in English). Try saying the word plaza Castilian style.

Spanish verb conjugation of ver estar

A grammatical difference from other dialects is the more frequent use of the plural pronoun 'vosotros' for 'you'  (you all in Texan!)  Other Spanish dialects use ustedes for more than one person you are speaking to. This is significant because  vosotros and ustedes require different verb endings. I memorized the vosotros verb endings, like estáis, habláis, coméis, vivís (you-plural are, speak, eat, live) when I was in high school, but they are no longer in my speaking vocabulary. Maybe I had better bone up on verb conjugations before I travel to Spain later on this year.! 

Seal of Real Academia Española

There is another, expanded meaning of Castilian Spanish which refers to the concept of Standard Spanish. Many languages have one dialect that for political and economic reasons is raised to the status of Standard Dialect and used by the media and educational institutions.  The Royal Spanish Academy (Real Academia Española) has declared that Castilian Spanish is the standard dialect. Now Castilian Spanish has taken on a new meaning of 'the correct way to speak Spanish'.

With an expanded meaning of Castilian Spanish, we can play amateur psychologist and delve into the possible meaning behind the aforementioned speaker's declaration that her parents had taught her Castilian Spanish. I don't believe that they insisted that she speak Spanish as it is spoken in a large part of Spain. They probably did insist that she use whatever they viewed as correct pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.  And their variety of Spanish may have been somewhat different from Southwestern Spanish.  A bit of language snobbishness, I would guess.  

I'm anticipating learning a lot about attitudes toward using different varieties of Spain when we travel there.  I remember from our last trip that a restaurant owner paid me a backhanded compliment by saying that my Spanish was quite good, but that I sounded like a 'Chicana'.  Another bit of language snobbery, it seems. I think he meant that I was using New World instead of Old World Spanish, which would be perfectly natural, since I am American and learned my Spanish on the US-Mexico border.

Spanish-speaking regions of the world

 At least he didn't complain about a feature of my Spanish that embarrasses me to no end -  my lack of a good, strong trilled 'r'!