She’s rather proficient at both Portuguese and Italian. She has a bit of a hard time distinguishing mid-open /ɛ ɔ/ and mid-closed /e o/ in both (see: PT “história” and “adora”, IT “scuole”), so you can kind of guess that she’s a native Spanish speaker, but past that her pronunciation is clear and fairly easy to understand - to the point that you can even pinpoint which varieties she’s taking (conscious or unconsciously) as pronunciation reference:
- Portuguese - Paulistano for sure. She kept Spanish coda [ɾ] intact, but she’s raising the final vowels (even if not necessary).
- Italian - Northern-ish, urban. She renders /s/ as [z] (Southerners would use [s]).
Her Italian prosody sounds a bit off, but I can’t pinpoint exactly why. She also realised “specialmente” with /s/ instead of /tʃ/, but this sort of “slip” happens. (At least she isn’t hyper-correcting “caso” if, in case into “cazzo” dick, like the pope did.)
Her English shows a rather thick American accent (rhotic, tapping), but that’s kind of a given (she lives there IIRC).
Great comment. She effectively communicates in all those languages, which is impressive. Who cares about her pronunciation mistakes or her accent ! Still, your analysis is interesting to understand the roots of Latin languages and how subconsciously we tend to phonetically use our mother tongue phonetics when communicating using other romanic languages and dialects. It happens to me when speaking specially French or Italian that I cannot avoid but using the tonic syllable of my native language. I always say that, even is not a Latin/greek based language, I love how Swedish pronounce their English: in my experience, kind of trying to communicate efficiently and forgetting, as much as neutrally possible, about the accent. (To be said that later on I learnt that most Scandinavians also have a strong accent when speaking English). I guess that the question is if to be considered a proficient speaker of a specific language, do you need to loose all traits of a foreign accent?
subconsciously we tend to phonetically use our mother tongue phonetics when communicating using other romanic languages and dialects.
Yup. The “posh” word for that is transference; you transfer features from all varieties that you speak into each other. It isn’t exclusive to Romance varieties, it’s just that among Romance languages you can get away transferring more stuff (as there’s a good chance that the feature in question also exists in the target language).
This gets interesting in Shakira’s Portuguese, because she is not transferring a few Spanish features into Portuguese, even if she could theoretically do so, and still pass as a native. A quick example of that would be how she pronounces “determinante” with [tʃi], even if plenty Portuguese speakers would use [te] instead, as you would in Spanish.
I guess that the question is if to be considered a proficient speaker of a specific language, do you need to loose all traits of a foreign accent?
It depends, really. There isn’t a single answer. For some, full proficiency is to speak a language as native speakers would; for others it’s just about being able to communicate with other speakers (native or not) efficiently.
Personally I’d consider the Swedish speakers from your example as fully proficient, as long as they’re able to communicate what they want.
I think it’s impressive that she speaks them with that much confidence and she sounds like she put in the hours to learn each one. I just think that Romance languages like Portuguese, Catalan and most French feel like cheating for Spanish speakers and vice-versa, though. It’s not uncommon for us to learn those languages in a few months. Still, mad respect for reaching out to her fans like that.
While you can transfer a lot of knowledge from a Romance language into another, I wouldn’t call it “cheating”; people do this all the time when learning a new language, even unrelated or not-closely-related ones.
In special, both her Portuguese and Italian show that she spent quite a bit of time/effort actually studying/training the languages, she isn’t just breezing through mutual Romance intelligibility.
Yeah, I don’t mean to downplay her effort. She did say in her Portuguese interview that she learned it “in a month when she was 18” which was pretty much my experience learning a bit of French a few years back which I can mostly read after passively absorbing the grammar. It feels like reading Spanish for the most part.
Are you exaggerating when you say a few months? Because based on my personal experience as a native English speaker who’s spent a combined ~14 years to study two languages (only one of which even stuck), I cannot imagine becoming more than “hooray I can occasionally pick out a word or two when watching the news!”-level of proficient in a new language after a few months, even with intense study.
Native speakers of a romance language are already at “occasionally pick out a word or two when watching the news” level or better for other romance languages, without having to study them at all. They simply share a lot of words amongst themselves. Becoming decently conversational in a few months is not an exaggeration.
redacted for privacy :3
Oh, not exaggerating at all. I can read quite a bit of Portuguese because it’s quite similar to Spanish and also French because I learned some grammar. It’s very much like reading German for English speakers. It can be tricky, but if you get the hang of mapping out some words between the two languages, it becomes much easier than it seems.
I think they were more referring to how knowing Spanish, a Latin-based language, can help in learning another Latin-based languages.
English is primarily Germanic-based so it falls out of the category for the most part.
I think the REAL “cheating” example is Spanish & Catalan.
I took 5 years in HS/college, and when I was in the Barcelona airport, I actually asked “why is everything written twice?” The differences seemed very very minor.
But I speak english poorly, and spanish… not really. So she’s still 700% better than me!
I’m a Spanish speaker that is afraid of French. I cannot make any of those sounds.
What helped me was Michael Thomas’s method for learning French. I literally played the CD once back in college and most of it stuck because the grammar is similar to Spanish and he makes it easy to learn. French vocabulary is a bit of a guessing game but it’s easier once you get the hang of it. You should give it a try, it only takes like a couple of days of passive listening.
7, her hips arent lieing, but they also arent speaking any verbal languages.
Wow those conversations were more in depth than I expected, even just responding to interview questions in her apparently more limited italian is pretty impressive
