Venezuelan Spanish ( or ) refers to the Spanish spoken in Venezuela.
Spanish was introduced in Venezuela by colonists. Most of them were from Galicia, Basque Country, Andalusia, or the Canary Islands. The last has been the most fundamental influence on modern Venezuelan Spanish, and Canarian and Venezuelan accents may even be indistinguishable to other Spanish-speakers.
Italian and Portuguese immigrants from the late 19th and the early 20th century have also had an influence; they influenced vocabulary and its accent, given its slight sing-songy intonation, like Rioplatense Spanish. German settlers also left an influence when Venezuela was contracted as a concession by the King of Spain to the German Welser banking family (Klein-Venedig, 1528–1546).
The Spaniards additionally brought African slaves, which is the origin of expressions such as ("excellent"), which comes from Yoruba . Other non-Romance words came from indigenous languages, such as (a type of coffee) and (black bean).
Features
Venezuelan Spanish sometimes shortens words, such as para ("for") to pa'''. In addition, between vowels is sometimes dropped (elision): helado ("ice cream") becomes . Originally from southern Spain and the Canary Islands, those traits are common to many other Spanish variations and in the Caribbean. Another common feature is the debuccalization of syllable-final , whereby adiós ("goodbye") becomes and este ("east") becomes . It is common to most coastal areas in America, the Canary Islands, and the southern half of Spain. Syllable-final undergoes velarisation. This may also happen before bilabials and alveolars instead of assimilation: ambientación ("atmosphere") becomes or . Also like most other American versions of Spanish, Venezuelan Spanish has yeísmo (the merger of and ) and seseo ( and are merged). That is, calló ("s/he became silent") and cayó ("s/he fell") are homophones, and casa ("house") is homophonous with caza ("hunt"). Seseo is common to all of America, the Canary Islands, and southern Spain, and yeísmo is prevalent in most Spanish dialects. The phoneme is realized as glottal in the Venezuelan Caribbean, like in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia, Spanish Caribbean islands, Canary Islands, and southern Spain and sometimes in Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Argentina. A characteristic common to Spanish in Venezuela, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Costa Rica is the use of the diminutive -ico and -ica, instead of the standard -ito and -ita in words with -t in the last syllable: rata ("rat") becomes ratica ("little rat"). Another noteworthy diminutive is "manito," instead of the more common "manita." The second-person singular informal pronoun is usually tú, as in most of the rest of Latin America and in Spain. That is referred to as tuteo. However, in Zulia and some parts of Falcón and Trujillo, it is common to find voseo, the use of vos instead of tú. That phenomenon is present in many other Latin American variations (notably Central American Spanish and Rioplatense), but Zulian voseo is diptongado: conjugation preserves the diphthongs of the historical vos conjugation, which have had monophthongization in Rioplatense. The Zulian forms are thus the same as those in Spain for the second-person plural vosotros): instead of tú eres, tú estás, Zulian has vos sois, vos estáis (compare with the plural forms in Spain vosotros sois, vosotros estáis, and with Rioplatense forms, vos sos, vos estás). Another exception to tuteo in Venezuela is the use of the second-person singular formal pronoun usted interchangeably with tú in informal speech, unique to the states of Mérida, Táchira and Trujillo. As in most of the rest of the Americas, the only plural form of the second person is ustedes. The word vaina is used with a variety of meanings (such as "shame," "thing or topic," or "pity") and is often an interjection or a nonsensical filler, however is considered a rude word and should be avoided in formal conversation. Venezuelan Spanish has a lot of Italianisms, Gallicisms, Germanisms, and Anglicisms.
Regional variations
There are several subdialects of Venezuelan Spanish: