Anyone from the center of the country who travels to the Yucatan peninsula will be surprised to hear the Yucatecan accent, which according to anthropologist Miguel Güémez Pineda, It is a way of speaking between pushed, dragged, which is colloquially defined as beaten.
And it is that, undoubtedly, it is a very different pronunciation from that of other regions of the country, which has its origin in the fusion of Spanish with the Mayan language; which resulted in a dialect in which there are high, low, articulate and glottalized accents.
On the other hand, in central Mexico, the Spanish spoken there is influenced by the accent of the native languages, such as Nahuatl. That Spanish is often referred to as ‘cantadito’ and many foreigners consider it the typical Mexican accent.
The Yucatecan accent, part of a rich dialect
The accent goes hand in hand with the language and in the case of Yucatan, the Spanish spoken in that state is one of the most unique variants, which is explained because it was the territory of the ancient Mayan civilization.
As a consequence, hundreds of thousands of people today speak Maya and exchange a large number of Mayan words, foreign to the rest of the Mexicans, into Spanish.
In addition, that fusion of languages is properly a dialect; a mixture of the local Maya, the Spanish that arrived with the conquest and even the Cuban Spanish, product of the trade with that island.
A disconnected peninsula
Another compelling reason for the rich Yucatecan dialect, with its peculiar accent, to survive, It is the geographical and linguistic isolation in which the Yucatan peninsula remained until the middle of the 20th century.
Historically, the Spanish focused on conquering Tenochtitlán and did not show, at first, much interest in the Mayan towns of the southeast of the country.
Although there were attempts to replace Mayan with Spanish in the 16th and 17th centuries, the conquistadors ran into rebellions by the Mayan peoples and, much to their regret, they gradually incorporated Mayan voices and expressions that today continue to make the accent unique. yucatecan
Finally, as the philologist Fernando Espejo Méndez beautifully expressed regarding speech in Yucatán:
In Yucatan it is spoken in a different way (…). It is undoubtedly the result of the force, of the stubborn permanence of the indigenous substratum (…), the Mayan language, in a clear mixture with the Castilian, already affected in its course of American conquest, of colorful and transforming influences -caribisms , Nahuatlismos― to more than an infinity of terms smelling of tar and sea”.
