The official language of Chile is Spanish ( castellano as Chileans call it), which is spoken by practically all the country's inhabitants. In the northern region about twenty thousand indigenous people also speak Aymará, while most of Chile's Mapuche population speak or at least understand their ancestral language, Mapudungu. In Eastern Island the two thousand native inhabitants speak their own language of Polynesian origin. Chileans of foreign ancestry do sometime also speak their mother tongue but do so almost exclusively in the intimacy of their home.
One of the most spectacular expressions of the existing cultural homogeneity is the relative absence of recognizable regional accents, despite the country's extreme geographic length. For instance, the differences in accent between middle-class Chileans from Antofagasta, Santiago, Valdivia, and Punta Arenas are almost inaudible. The national coverage of many Santiago-based radio and television stations also helps to homogenize Chilean Spanish. In contrast, there are in Chile very sharp accent distinctions among the different social classes.
Chilean Spanish is quite characteristic and is immediately identified in other Latin American countries for its distinctive "melody." Chileans generally speak very fast and terminal consonants are often not even spoken. They also often add the suffix –"ito" or –"ita" (meaning "little") to the end of words. In addition, Chilean speech contains many words adopted from the Mapuche language as well as much chilenismos (Chilean slang).
Tiffany, this is really interesting stuff. To what do you attribute the lack of regional accents across the same class, but distinct accents between classes. This is is really amazing when you consider the geography of the country -- it is thousands of miles long, with large expanses of mountainous regains. One would think that Chile would have huge regional differences in pronunciation due to the isolation of the population and the long distances one would have to travel to be exposed to other accents. Yet, it seems that people communicate more within one's class, and less across classes regardless of geography. There must be profound class delineations within Chile --- Anne Whitehair
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