Regions

Plate 01 · Caribbean

Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Panama, Caribbean Colombia, and coastal Venezuela. Defined by coda /s/ weakening, liquid neutralization (r/l swaps), and fast, staccato prosody.

Plate 02 · Andean & Pacific

Peru, highland Colombia, Ecuador, and highland/Andean Venezuela. Defined by conservative consonantism (retained coda /s/), assibilated /r/, and contact-influenced vowel reduction in the highlands.

Plate 03 · Rioplatense

Argentina and Uruguay. Defined by sheismo/zheismo (the yeísmo merger realized as [ʃ] or [ʒ]), voseo, and the sing-song 'Rioplatense bounce' intonation.

Plate 04 · Central American

Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Defined by voseo (except Guatemala City's mixed usage), a sing-song intonation contour, and the -ico diminutive in parts of the region.

Plate 05 · Southern Cone

Chile. Defined by extremely fast, syllable-eliding speech, fronted /tʃ/ -> [ʃ], glottal-stop insertion, and a fricated /tr/.

Plate 06 · Iberian Foundations

Peninsular Spain: Madrid, Andalusia, Extremadura, Murcia, and the Canary Islands. Defined by the distincion/seseo/ceceo three-way split and, in the Canaries, a Caribbean-like aspiration that reflects centuries of transatlantic contact.

Plate 07 · Mexico

Mexico across four very different profiles: highland central Mexico's crisp, devocalized-vowel norm; the fronted CH and clipped rhythm of the north; Caribbean-type aspiration on the Gulf coast; and Maya-contact glottalization and intonation in Yucatan.

Plate 08 · Paraguay & Bolivia

Two contact zones shaped by indigenous substrates: Guarani-influenced lowland Paraguay, and Bolivia's Andean highlands (La Paz) versus its Amazonian/Caribbean-adjacent lowlands (Santa Cruz).

Plate 09 · Diaspora & Contact Varieties

Spanish varieties shaped by sustained contact with another dominant language: US Spanish in three regional bases (Nuyorican, Chicano, Miami Cuban), and Equatorial Guinea's African Spanish, the only Spanish-official variety native to Sub-Saharan Africa.

Plate 10 · Brazil

Ten regional profiles spanning Brazilian Portuguese's defining shared traits (phonemic vowel nasalization, /t d/-palatalization before /i/, final unstressed /e o/ raising) and the sharp regional splits on top of them (Rio's chiado, Caipira's retroflex R, Mineiro's syncopation, Gaúcho's Spanish-contact profile, and more).

Plate 11 · Lusophone Europe (Portugal)

European Portuguese, defined against Brazilian Portuguese chiefly by heavy unstressed-vowel reduction to [ɨ]/[ɐ], no /t d/-palatalization, and (in Lisbon and much of the south) a uvular R, with Porto/the North and the island groups (Açores, Madeira) each carrying their own documented departures from the Lisbon standard.

Plate 12 · Lusophone Africa

Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and São Tomé e Príncipe: Portuguese varieties shaped by Bantu (and, in Cabo Verde's case, Creole-contact) substrates that -- unlike European Portuguese -- generally resist unstressed-vowel reduction and often fortify intervocalic /b d g/.

Plate 13 · Lusophone Asia

Timor-Leste and Macau: the smallest and most sparsely documented Lusophone communities. Both presets here are necessarily lower-confidence approximations -- flagged as such in their blurbs -- given how little instrumented phonetic fieldwork exists compared to Brazil, Portugal, or Angola.

Plate 14 · Caribbean Creoles

Haitian Kreyòl, the Papiamento/u of the ABC islands (Curaçao, Aruba, Bonaire), Palenquero (San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia), and Jamaican Patois -- four independent creole languages, each with its own grammar (and, where standardized, its own orthography), that happen to share the Caribbean basin. Jamaican Patois is English-lexified rather than French/Iberian-lexified like the other three, which is exactly why it needs `language='mixed'` rather than being folded into this app's `'en'` English track -- most of its vocabulary traces to English, but its grammar (preverbal TMA particles, its own pronoun system) does not, the same reasoning already applied to Cape Verdean Kriolu relative to Portuguese.

Plate 15 · Portunol / Portuñol Border Varieties

Genuine Spanish-Portuguese contact varieties along the Uruguay-Brazil and Paraguay-Brazil borders -- stable, rule-governed blends rather than code-switching, and the clearest showcase of Familect's mix-and-match premise.

Plate 16 · Pacific Spanish-Lexified Creole

Chabacano (Zamboangueño), the Spanish-lexified creole of Zamboanga City in the Philippines -- geographically the furthest-flung Spanish-lexified creole in the world.

Plate 17 · Cape Verdean Kriolu

Kabuverdianu/Kriolu, the Portuguese-lexified creole of Cape Verde -- a distinct language from Cape Verdean Portuguese, split here into its Sotavento (Santiago) and Barlavento (São Vicente) branches.

Plate 18 · US Spanish (Expanded)

Six additional US Spanish varieties beyond the Nuyorican, Chicano/Southwest, and Miami Cuban presets already in this library: New Mexican Traditional, Tejano, Dominican-York, Salvadoran-American, Isleño, and a heritage-speaker profile.

Plate 19 · North American English

General American, the US South, New York City and African American English. Rhoticity is the fault line most learners notice first, but the live one is the low back merger -- whether 'cot' and 'caught' are the same word -- which is spreading across the continent in real time and is not settled.

Plate 20 · British and Irish English

Received Pronunciation, Estuary/Cockney London, northern England, the West Midlands, Scotland and Ireland. Two splits divide this group more than anything else: TRAP-BATH and FOOT-STRUT, both of which happened in the south of England and neither of which reached the north.

Plate 21 · Caribbean English

Jamaican and Trinidadian English. Systematic varieties with their own vowel inventories -- notably a TRAP-BATH-PALM collapse and centring diphthongs where a rhotic accent has r-coloured vowels -- and their own consonant rules, including the TH-stopping that makes 'thing' begin with a [t].

Plate 22 · Southern Hemisphere English

Australian English: non-rhotic, with the whole diphthong system shifted round from its southern-English starting point and a strongly tensed happY vowel.

Plate 23 · African English

South African and Nigerian English: two systematic, postcolonial varieties, each with its own vowel inventory and rhythm, grouped here as a starting point rather than a claim that African English reduces to two countries -- the continent's real range (Kenyan, Ghanaian, Zimbabwean, and many more) is not represented yet.

Plate 24 · South Asian English

Indian English: the most-spoken English variety in the world by population, modelled here as a single supraregional preset over what is, in reality, enormous internal regional variation -- the same honest single-preset caveat this app already applies to Irish and Australian English.

Plate 25 · Quebec / Laurentian French

French as spoken in Quebec, sharply diverged from European French since New France's 17th-18th century settlement and the two varieties' subsequent centuries of separate contact and development (Ostiguy & Tousignant 1993). Three presets: Montreal (urban, the most vernacular/joual-leaning), Quebec City (the same Laurentian innovations, in a more conservative register), and Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean (the same innovations again, at their most phonologically marked -- Dumas 1987).

Plate 26 · Acadian French

French as spoken in the Maritimes (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island), descended from a SEPARATE 17th-century Acadie settlement, not from New France -- a genuinely distinct history from Quebec French, not a regional variant of it (Flikeid 1997). Notably lacks the Laurentian /t d/ affrication and long-vowel diphthongization that are hallmarks of every preset in `french_quebec` above. Includes both plain Acadian French (`fr-ca-acadian`) and Chiac (`fr-ca-chiac`), the heavily English-contact-mixed Moncton urban variety -- a related but separate `language="mixed"` preset, not a dialect distinction within plain `language="fr"` Acadian French. See this file's module docstring.