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I am watching La casa de papel (in Spanish with subtitles in my language because my Spanish is not that good), and I have noticed that two characters, father and son (Moscú and Denver, for those who know the show), speak what I believe is some dialect or variant of Spanish, whose most evident phonological trait seems to be the fact that they omit several “s” sounds. They omit them pretty systematically at the end of the words and sometimes in the middle: es > e; estar > etar; vamos > vamo; entonces > entonce, several plurals (pelotas > pelota; palmeras > palmera), and so on. Estás is almost ta. I hear other omissions too (todo > to), but it might just be due to speaking fast.

Does anybody know which dialect or variant of Spanish might that be?

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  • This sounds a lot like Andalusian, but i haven't watched the show so i'm not posting this as an answer. (on TV the andalusian accent is often pretty forced, but that's just me nitpicking)
    – Brian H.
    Commented Jan 19, 2018 at 13:51
  • If nobody can help you the resources mentioned in this Q&A spanish.stackexchange.com/questions/1350/… may help you track it down.
    – mdewey
    Commented Jan 19, 2018 at 14:10
  • It's a good thing you mentioned the title for someone to look up. The s "omission" (it's generally aspirated to sound like /h/ and can affect the pronunciation of the vowels, normally lengthening them, and even when not aspirated, it can often almost have a glottal stop quality to it) is incredibly common across the Spanish speaking world, including Andalucía, the Caribbean, and large parts of South America.
    – user0721090601
    Commented Jan 19, 2018 at 15:17
  • Here in Argentina, "swallowing the "s"s (as we call this phenomenon) is usually associated with a poor education.
    – Gustavson
    Commented Jan 20, 2018 at 1:55
  • I don't think the connection with lack of education, or lack of morals (not sure which you meant, @Gustavson,) is the general attitude in Mexico. My impression si that when someone speaks that way (se come las eses), people assume he's from an area reasonably close to the Gulf of Mexico - there being a correlation between low altitude compared to sea level, and how much S one omits.
    – aparente001
    Commented Jan 20, 2018 at 5:06

2 Answers 2

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That definitely sounds like an Andalusian accent. I confirmed that the actor that plays Moscú is Paco Tous. He was born in Seville (as I was) and raised in El Puerto de Santa María (Cádiz). Both cities are located in Andalusia, and Paco does not hide his local accent (many actors do).

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    That's a wow for me cause I am from Chile and most of the spaniards that came originally to Chile were from that region. The rest of South America usually mock us about the strong "bad endings" of our way of talking. It's more like this: "Tooh loh otroh se han lle'a'o suh cosah, menoh nosotroh" instead of "Todos los otros se han llevado sus cosas, menos nosotros" (All the others have taken their things except for us). That is not formal speaking, but is fairly common among the poorer or uneducated portion of the society and when you speak really really fast (but is pretty common).
    – Billeeb
    Commented Jan 19, 2018 at 16:59
  • @Billeeb Dudo que sólo los chilenos se traguen las eses finales. Sin tener datos, me parece que es un fenómeno costero, y que lo que pasa es que Chile maximiza su contacto con la costa, al menos porcentualmente. (O quizá Cuba gane, pero también se comen las eses y otras consonantes.)
    – c.p.
    Commented Feb 23, 2020 at 16:52
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I've just watched a few scenes with both characters in them. They sound like uneducated southern Madrid.

Moscú has an Andalusian undertone, which makes sense, as Charlie points out the actor himself is Andalusian.

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