| Canarian Spanish | |
|---|---|
| español canario | |
 Estación de guaguas ("Bus station") at Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, Canary Islands. | |
| Pronunciation | [espaˈɲol kaˈnaɾjo] |
| Native to | Spain |
| Region | Canary Islands |
| Ethnicity | Canary Islanders, Isleños |
Native speakers | (undated figure of 2 million[citation needed]) |
Early forms | |
| Dialects | |
| Spanish alphabet | |
| Official status | |
Official language in |  Spain
|
| Regulated by | Real Academia Española & Academia Canaria de la Lengua |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | cana1269 |
| Linguasphere | 51-AAA-be |
| IETF | es-IC |
 Canarian Spanish belongs to the Romance family | |
Canarian Spanish or Canary Island Spanish (Spanish terms in descending order of frequency: español de Canarias, español canario, habla canaria, or dialecto canario[3]) is a variant of standard Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands by the Canary Islanders.
Canarian Spanish heavily influenced the development of Caribbean Spanish and other Latin American Spanish vernaculars because Hispanic America was originally largely settled by colonists from the Canary Islands and Andalusia; those dialects, including the standard language, were already quite close to Canarian and Andalusian speech. In the Caribbean, Canarian speech patterns were never regarded as either foreign or very different from the local accent.
The incorporation of the Canary Islands into the Crown of Castile began with Henry III (1402) and was completed under the Catholic Monarchs. The expeditions for their conquest started off mainly from ports of Andalusia, which is why the Andalusians predominated in the Canaries. There was also an important colonising contingent from Portugal in the early conquest of the Canaries, along with the Andalusians and the Castilians from mainland Spain. In earlier times, Portuguese settled alongside the Spanish in the north of Gran Canaria, but they died off or were absorbed by the Spanish. The population that inhabited the islands before the conquest, the Guanches,[4] spoke a variety of Berber (also called Amazigh) dialects. After the conquest, the indigenous Guanche language was rapidly and almost completely eradicated in the archipelago. Only some names of plants and animals, terms related to cattle ranching and numerous island placenames survive.[5]
Their geography made the Canary Islands receive much outside influence, with drastic cultural and linguistic changes. As a result of heavy Canarian emigration to the Caribbean, particularly during colonial times, Caribbean Spanish is strikingly similar to Canarian Spanish.
- ^ Spanish at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
- ^ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2022). "Castilic". Glottolog 4.6. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- ^ The terms isleño and dialecto isleño are also used, but they can be ambiguous, as they are applied to other island dialects as well.
- ^ The term guanche originally referred to the aborigines of Tenerife, but nowadays it is used commonly to refer also to the aborigines of the rest of the islands.
- ^ "The Canarian Spanish Dialect". Archived from the original on 2012-07-30. Retrieved 2016-01-09.
