Mandarin and Cantonese are essentially two different languages that happen to share the same characters. Someone from Honduras would be able to understand 99.9% of what a Spaniard says. If you only speak Mandarin you wouldn't be able to understand Cantonese at all.

But why?

I'd think in all of those cases it should be the variant that has the greatest population or proximity.

Fun fact: Mexican Spanish is derived from Castilian Spanish from the central and northern regions of Spain, and was later influenced by Indigenous, African and Caribbean languages.

It doesn't change what you said, I just think it's a cool fact. :D

Having learned a language where dialect often means you can barely understand each other if at all, I'm more inclined to consider Mexican vs Castilian an accent much the same way as English's American vs Australian/british/etc..

Forgive me but I wanted to nitpick all those examples

Cantonese is not a dialect of Madarin. It’s a distinct language, just a smaller one.

Standard Arabic is not actually spoken anywhere, and is primarily a written form. Egyptian pronunciations ARE commonly taught, not only because Egypt is big but because, with Egypt’s large entertainment sector, they have exported their pronunciations around the world in TV and movies. When you take Middlebury College’s famous language immersion courses, you learn Egyptian Arabic.

British English is taught largely as a colonial legacy, not because England predates the US and Australia in history and is therefore considered “standard.”

While all of these secondary examples are flawed, IMO, I believe you’re actually right about Castilian Spanish. It’s simply more of an individual case than part of a common pattern.

Kinda the same here in Nevada. Our Spanish teacher explained them briefly but told us we didn't need to learn them, didn't test us on them, so on.

Vos-conjugations are not a thing in spain though? You mean tu-conjugations?

When I was in school in the 1970s it was because they couldn't get French teachers from Quebec. The youth wanted to stay and build a sovereign Quebec. So they imported French teachers from France and I speak like a French Duke.

And in Switzerland we have to learn quebeccan French. And so the circle closes.

(we train it at the end when we train understanding non-standard pronounciations)

I don't know what we you're referring to, but in the part of central Ontario where my nephew attends school, the French immersion schools are most definitely teaching Quebecois French.

I tried speaking real French with my nephew and he reacted as if I was a space alien.

I remember this, after I was told I was learning France French I was a bit confused. Why wouldn't we be learning Quebecois?

To be fair, I was a bad student so I wasn't actually learning either...

Thy is the super formal form of the conjugation, vosotros is the colloquial form of ustedes.

Tu-vosotros. Usted-ustedes. You-yall. Thou-thy.

You have it backwards, it's the Latin countries which sound super formal and awkward to us spaniards.

France French people say wayh too. It's the same difference between saying "yes" and "yeah".

I once stayed in a youth hostel rural Quebec and had a really weirdly hostile reception from people there, despite dredging up my very best schoolgirl French to try and make conversation. Turns out they thought I was from Ontario. When I revealed I was a Kiwi they were all suddenly very friendly. Too late!

Ouais is more like 'yeah', not 'yes'.

It's not an autobus, it's la guagua

It's not un banana, it's un gineo

It's not automovil, it's El carro

I can keep going.

Dominican here so my Spanish includes...

Que vaina

Un molote

Un mojonera

Mojiganga

Sana sana colito de rana

I'll be honest, I never hear anyone say vos in Spain, except an Argentinian who said it all the time and it sounded really odd

I grew up in California and had the opposite experience. I had friends who grew up speaking Mexican-Spanish at home, and would take the Spanish classes to get an easy A.

The teachers never understood what the Mexican-Spanish students were saying, and kept telling the native speakers that they were doing it wrong.

I think there is a European bias and maybe a (perceived?) prestige bias to Castilian as well.

Do you mean New Mexican Spanish?

I think it's silly to say that Spain Spanish is canonical, though. Like, says who? Spanish people? Spanish in Spain is a dialect just like any other Spanish-speaking country. Imo it makes sense to teach the dialect that learners are most likely to encounter based on their geographic location, with context about the other dialects.

I don't know for sure what we learned, but I remember my Spanish teacher talking about a girl from Spain that came to her class and didn't do her work.

Apparently the girl wasn't doing well in Spanish class and later accused the teacher of teaching "gutter Mexican."

Which ... honestly didn't hit me as the flex my Spanish teacher seemed to be making it out to be.

And then when you actually spend any time in a place where Spanish is the first language, you start to understand that, like any language, there's the academic form (commonly taught to non-native speakers as a second or third etc. language), and then there's the local version, complete with all the colloquialisms and slang and unique pronunciations. In Argentina, the double-L (which school taught me makes a "y" sound, "ella" being pronounced basically "ey-ya") is commonly pronounced as more of a soft "J" sound ("ella" becomes "ey-jha"). As far as my (admittedly limited) knowledge goes, that's really not common outside of Argentina. And then in Bolivia, especially among native descendants (Quechua and Aymara predominantly), the double-r (which school taught me is one of two conditions when you roll the R with a tongue trill) is more commonly pronounced almost like a "zh" ("herramienta" becomes "hezhamienta"). Again, not common outside of Bolivia. Spain has that classic "Barthelona" lisp, and uses the "vosotros" pronoun where most South American Spanish speakers would probably use "ustedes" (basically "y'all" vs. "esteemed plural second persons"). And that's not even getting into which verb tenses are used most widely in different regions. There's like 14 or 15 specific verb tenses in Spanish to English's 7, and in school I was taught to use specific ones to communicate effectively; then I went and spent two months in Bolivia pretty much never using past perfect or predicate, instead using past imperfect for 95% of interactions, only using past perfect with other folks que hablan español como segunda lengua, or in a few very specific interactions where more detail or specificity was required than would be so in common, everyday interactions. [Edit for spelling]

Spaniard living in the US here to clarify how our language works. Spaniards are the best at speaking their own language by definition. We make the language, and we decide how it evolves. When you say many Spaniards suck at speaking their own language, I think you are getting confused with the many dialects that exist within the Spain. Some dialects, while being perfectly and dramatically correct, are very hard for non-native speakers to understand. Pronunciation of letters may change from dialect to dialect, but the grammar is basically the same.

The authority that sets the Spanish language grammar rules (Real Academia Española - RAE) is in Spain, and it's rules only apply to the "standard" Spanish dialect spoken in Spain, which is also known as Castillian. However, there are multiple other dialects of Spanish within Spain (and multiple other languages that are not Spanish - Galego, Catalan, Euskera, etc). Other countries that speak other Spanish dialects choose if they want to follow or not the rules set by the RAE, and many Spanish dialects do not follow those rules. Some Spanish speaking countries have their own organizations to define their Spanish dialects. There are dialects of Spanish that are very different from the original Castillian Spanish. For example, listen to Argentinian Spanish, and compare it to Castillian Spanish. The difference is noticeable even for non-Spanish speakers. They also use a slightly different grammar.

Same language but with huge differences world wide, as languages tend to do. Believe a person whom lived in Mexico for over 2 decades, Mexican Spanish is NOT the exact same. It's mostly similar and you'll be able to understand but it will be immediately obvious that it's very different.

I watch Spain Spanish movies and regularly have trouble understanding it all

The tipoffs to being Spain Spanish if they teach extra conjugations for vosotros and if they speak evening with a lisp because at some point it was decided to emulate a king with a speech impediment.

In the same way that Americans speak English.

Sure, their language is mutual intelligible with English, but if an Englishman comes over here and asks for some chips, they're going to get a bag of crisps. They'll mess up verb conjunction on a bunch of collective nouns.

And bless the souls of my Australian mates who come here and call everyone a cunt.

Does it? My partner has learned some very strange words I have never heard used in mexico. But I guess the rest of Latin America also uses different dialects.

There's uh, lots more than 2. It's similar to how there's English English and Nigerian English, just dialectical differences - some more major than others.

A lot more than two. Even within Latin America, there are some fairly interesting differences in grammar, vocab, and pronunciation.

There's far more than two, just like there's plenty of dialects of english jaja

My knowledge may be dated and it may vary by state, but the "I want to go to uni" track had a two-year requirement of a foreign language. When I was in school, French and Spanish were the only choices and most people wanted to study Spanish. My school system had German as well at some point, but it was cut before I got into highschool in the mid '90s. Some schools have Latin, Japanese, and others as well.

Here in the upper mid west a lot of schools teach Spanish. Not at a you can speak level usually. Similar to how a lot of people learn biology and forget it all when they graduate.

In my state there was some reason they wanted us all to take a second language (I think it was some scholarship we would qualify for our something?) and I always thought the reason most schools had Spanish was because finding a teacher certificated to teach Spanish was more common than other languages. And both of mine were just Midwest white dudes.

I live in a medium size town in the midwest, and all of our schools offered Spanish. My high school also had french, and the richer schools had german and japanese

I don't know about OP. I went to a public school on the eastern seaboard and we certainly weren't taught "Spain Spanish." The pronunciations and pronouns we were taught would've been very different if that were the case.

If any specific dialect was taught in those classrooms, it would've been because a teacher spoke that dialect natively. All of our teachers were either non-native Spanish speakers, or from somewhere in Central or South America. Maybe OP had teachers from Europe?

If there were regional differences for vocabulary, we were told about them. For example, for the English word "bus," we were taught that "autobus," "guagua," and "camion" all work but in different countries/regions. To be clear, we weren't expected to remember all the variations, but we were informed that they exist.

I think it depends more on your instructor rather than the region you're in. When I was in HS I took two years of Spanish and our teacher was from Spain, so her instruction was in line with that.

It's definitely racism

It makes zero sense.

The indigenous people didn't talk in Mexican Spanish.

You may want to reread the question as your answer makes zero sense.