Canarian Spanish or Canary Island Spanish (Spanish terms in descending order of frequency: , , , or ) 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, 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.
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.
Grammar
As with most other varieties of Spanish outside Mainland Spain, the preterite is generally used instead of the perfect: ("today I visited John") for ("today I have visited John"). Like most other varieties of Spanish outside central and northern Spain, is used for all second-person plurals: is used for . Other usages include also the use of the third-person plural pronouns and to refer the second-person instead of and as in the American Spanish. Example : (Do you remember where your house was?) for Canarian Spanish while being for Iberian Spanish. Speakers in the Canary Islands typically use third-person object pronouns in the same way as speakers from Andalusia and the Americas; that is, without , using the older, case-determined system of reference. Diminutive forms are typically shorter than in Peninsular Spanish, though the peninsular forms are used as a result of influence from the mainland: for 'little dance' and for 'little town'. As with many other varieties of Spanish outside Mainland Spain, ("of") is deleted in some expressions: for and for .