From what I’ve heard, it’s an “accentless” Spanish that is used in Latin American voicing/dubbing for movies, TV series and video games, with the purpose being to derive maximum enjoyment out of every country in Latin America without catering to a specific country. However, I don’t quite understand everything.
I always hear people on the internet say “Everyone has an accent” in response to someone who claims to have no accent. So how can Neutral Spanish just not have any sort of accent?
If it’s an artificially created accent that voice actors have to learn, wouldn’t that make it difficult to get immersed into the media you’re watching, since it’s not a natural accent anyone speaks with in real life?
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A bit of context – the Spanish spoken in Latin America was based on Castilian/Castellano – originating from Castile, Spain. There are several other dialects/languages spoken in Spain which include but are not limited to : Euskara (Basque language formally known was vasco, vasquence), Catalán (which is closer to French than Castilian), Galician/Gallego (much closer to Portuguese than Castilian). There are more, but these are good examples to just show unintelligible these languages can be to Spanish speakers within Spain whom might not understand all the different regional dialects/languages, but almost all can at least understand Castilian.
For the most part, Mexican Spanish (read: highbrow Mexico City and not working class Mexico) has become more or less the baseline neutral accent for most Latin American media. There are instances where local networks will dub over with a more local dialect (Argentina); however, consider British Received Pronunciation or Cosmopolitan (read: Parisian) French. While not everyone may speak that way, all anglophones understand RP and all francophones can understand Parisian French. This did not happen over night – it took centuries of colonialism, state sponsored educational campaigns to get here along with with the advent of radios, television and now the internet.
The phrase the “King’s English” refers to a time where what is now England was inhabited by several different ethnic groups that all spoke various different languages. Modern English sounds nothing like early or Middle English. RP is supposed to tie all the inhabitants of the UK together. Also consider that modern “Italian” didn’t exist up until the unification of the Italian states a century ago. Regional dialects still exist, but for the purpose of reaching all the masses, one dialect is used to communicate to all. Mandarin is also “fake dialect”, which to put it simply, it is the amalgamation of several regional dialects/languages within China to create a new language for the purpose of governing all those people.
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