Latin American Spanish: The language everyone uses but nobody speaks

In the scientific (STEM) and medical research industry, Latin American Spanish is the most requested variety of Spanish for multi-country use. Yet, it’s rarely ‘perfect’ and somewhat awkward in its diction. Here, I will explore why this persistent phenomenon occurs, and why LatAm Spanish is an extraordinary edge case in localization.

We recently had the pleasure to work on an interesting and challenging harmonization of high-stakes technical and engineering content in Spanish – and French, but that’s another story – variants from Africa, Spain, and Latin America.  Some variants were already labeled as LatAm Spanish.  The ideal goal: validate one universal Spanish version, usable in all Spanish-speaking countries in these regions, without causing cognitive friction for its users.

For the sake of simplicity and to maintain technical focus on LatAm Spanish, I intentionally use the term “Iberian Spanish” very loosely here, simply to denote that it’s Spanish from Spain, with or without its regional variants and including the very distinct Catalan. The official language in Spain is Castilian Spanish. 

So, the key strategic question in the project quickly became:

Which of these Spanish variants will be the pivot reference?

Given the vast geographic distance among these 3 regions – Africa, Spain and Latin America – coupled with natural dialectal drift, a well-established STEM register with rich terminology would be the deciding factor.  With that, Africa was out. So, which one will it be: the prestigious Iberian Spanish, Mexican Spanish as the Latin American anchor for scientific terminology, or the portable, never elegant, rarely pure, utilitarian Latin American Spanish?

What exactly is LatAm Spanish?

LatAm Spanish is not the same thing as U.S. Spanish. 

Despite being widely used across industries, there is no prescriptive definition of “Latin American Spanish.” Computational linguists describe it as a koiné: a neutral compromise dialect that emerges when related dialect groups need to communicate without privileging one over the other.

The goal is interoperability: a koiné that works in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Central America, …and increasingly also with the U.S. Hispanic population, without sounding foreign or biased toward any single country. Spain generally sits outside that convergence because its lexical, orthographic, and syntactic preferences diverge enough to increase cognitive friction for Hispanic people.  This makes LatAm Spanish a functionally strong solution for scaling across multiple Spanish-speaking markets.

Let’s briefly review the LatAm environment to get the bigger picture.

What is harmonization?

Harmonization is the key to understanding LatAm Spanish. It refers to the process of producing a written variety that minimizes country-specific features so it can function across multiple regions and professional domains. Its main objective is to reduce incompatibility between two or more dialects of the same base language and ensuring that terminology, register, and usage remain mutually intelligible. Harmonization filters out country-marked features and produces a neutral written variety capable of traveling across borders. In practical terms, it is the linguistic methodology that artificially synthesized LatAm Spanish into existence.

Standardized vs. Unified Language

Language standardization is essentially the act of compressing dialectal variation produced by geography, time, and weak institutional cohesion. A standardized language is one that has a formal authority defining what is correct, what is acceptable, and how terminology should be used, how it should evolve and when it’s time to reform it.

An authority that governs language use can be a language academy, a national education ministry, a regulatory body, or a non-profit technical standards organization. In varying depths of detail, it usually provides and maintains a national corpus, in developed economies it also maintains specialized corpora for various professional disciplines, along with a prescriptive backbone for spelling, grammar, terminology, and usage.

Brazilian Portuguese has it. Modern Standard Arabic has it. Mainland Chinese has it. Castilian Spanish has the Real Academia Española (RAE) and the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (ASALE) shaping its orthographic and grammatical rules.

By contrast, a unified language doesn’t have a formal authority governing its use and functions as a single language across regions for practical purposes. Speakers can understand one another, written forms are broadly intelligible, and shared norms emerge through use. In this context, unity is descriptive and formed by mutual intelligibility, shared media, commercial need, and communication pressure.

Why standardize a language?

National entities that govern language use are responsible for preserving the existence, continuity and functional modernization of a country’s language(s). Their responsibilities generally fall into three main areas:

1. Establishing standard language rules

• • • Defining “proper” usage by producing dictionaries, grammars, and spelling guides
    • Updating vocabulary, especially for literary, technological and modern concepts
    • Standardizing scientific, technical, medical, legal, and administrative terminology
    • Creating guidelines for language use in business, media, entertainment and government
    • Designating bilingual regions or offices based on population demand
    • Maintaining records of spoken and written language

2. Promoting the learning and use of official languages

• • • Basic education and academia
    • Daily life
    • Media and entertainment
    • Government and legal services

3. Protecting language rights

• • • Minimizing adoption of foreign terms (e.g., loanwords)
    • Implementing language acts for bilingualism, language status, etc.
    • Auditing public institutions on use of official languages
    • Handling language rights violations

Is LatAm standardized?

LatAm Spanish is not a standardized language and probably never will be, for reasons I will outline next. Operationally, however, it functions as a unified written standard that is underrated in its terminological depth and consciously leveraged for its exceptional pan-regional usability across Spanish-speaking countries.

Unlike the standardized national varieties from which it is derived, and despite being the most widely used and commercially dominant Spanish variety in the world, LatAm is not a spoken dialect. No Spanish speaker acquires it as a vernacular. It exists mainly as a written variety, and when spoken, it is spoken as it is scripted or verbalized in a media-friendly neutral form.

LatAm Spanish has no prescriptive center capable of defining what a “correct” consensus-based form should be. Accordingly, it has never been codified. By classical criteria for language standardization, it fails the test. There is no ISO standard, no regulatory framework, no style manual, no official dictionary, no canonical corpus and no mechanism for reform.

Latin America does not produce a unified corpus for a single LatAm variety. Each country maintains its own national corpus, and different countries specialize in different professional registers. Colombia dominates legal and administrative language, Mexico anchors pharmaceutical and medical communication, Argentina leads in media and cultural production, Chile and Peru drive the lexicon of finance and energy, and the U.S. Hispanic diaspora influences technology and marketing. These specialization patterns are linguistic byproducts of sectoral economics. Countries produce depth in the registers tied to the industries they host and the institutional capacities they develop around them.

Distributed specialization creates enormous collective lexical depth but it also introduces fragmentation, which reduces terminological alignment across national varieties.

Despite this, LatAm Spanish performs extremely well as a unified operational standard. Its governance is essentially open-source. Its neutral form and terminological density emerge from collectivistic operational ecosystems distributed across Latin America. In the absence of a prescriptive corpus, translators and editors map into its neutrality by removing features that trigger country-specific interpretation or dialectal bias.

Why LatAm Spanish functions as a de facto standard

Choosing from Iberian Spanish, Mexican Spanish and LatAm Spanish as the harmonization pivot for technical, scientific, and commercial content ultimately came down to several structural factors.

Market pressure and interoperability

Latin America functions as a market category composed of more than twenty sovereign countries, each with its own educational norms, media ecosystems, and lexical preferences. Together with the U.S. Hispanic market, these economies dwarf Spain in size and commercial significance by order of magnitude. As a result, the majority of Spanish scientific and engineering documents, medical research materials, public health content, and regulatory communication are produced for a LatAm target. Spain is usually localized separately due to lexical, orthographic, and grammatical differences.

In this context, LatAm Spanish has a practical advantage that Iberian Spanish cannot replicate: it scales. It can serve as a regional pivot for scientific, medical, administrative, and commercial communication. Iberian Spanish, like most standardized languages, is optimized for domestic use within Spain.

Cross-continent usability

LatAm Spanish can generally be consumed in Spain without major comprehension issues. A Spanish reader may note it as neutrally foreign, but it remains intelligible. Iberian Spanish does not travel as easily to Latin America. Iberian usage introduces marked features, such as plural systems, orthographic choices, and Spain-specific terminology, that trigger edits in nearly every LatAm country. In this respect, LatAm is more efficient despite its imperfect presentation.

Norm reinforcement through media ecosystems

Streaming platforms, broadcast networks, dubbing studios and U.S. cultural media circulate Latin American Spanish across Spanish-speaking audiences worldwide. It is frequently used on international and national news programs to ensure maximum comprehension across different countries. While not spoken in everyday life, in media broadcasts it’s delivered verbally with a designed, artificial accent to avoid strong regional idioms or slang. This frequent exposure familiarizes consumers with LatAm usage patterns and normalizes vocabulary that diverges from natively spoken dialects and Iberian preferences. 

Faster absorption of global terminology

In the absence of a prescriptive authority, Latin America adopts neutral, intelligible terminology more quickly than it polices marked regionalisms. In a non-standardized environment, harmonization acts as the closest functional equivalent to standardization.

Spain has depth in many areas as well, but LatAm’s proximity to North America and continuous contact with English, the global lingua franca for academic and technical domains, accelerates the intake of Anglicisms, calques, and newly coined expressions. The U.S. Hispanic population amplifies this effect. It consumes content, participates in technical and scientific domains, and feeds stabilized terminology back into Latin America through media, advertising, and digital communication. This feedback loop reinforces the koiné: it validates what is intelligible, filters out what is too local, and forces terminology to evolve more quickly in both technical and everyday registers.

This dynamic is double-edged. The lack of prescriptive control accelerates lexical innovation and market adoption, but during harmonization it also requires disciplined and closely managed editing to distinguish true errors from stylistic preferences and to prevent regional bias from contaminating neutrality.

The extraordinary utility of LatAm Spanish

All factors considered, the pivot reference that survived was the one that scaled. Iberian Spanish carries literary prestige and strong institutional standardization, while Mexican Spanish anchors the scientific and medical lexicon for Latin America. Both are valuable, but both require downstream localization to reach the broader Spanish-speaking world.

Different linguistic domains reward different traits. Literature and national institutions reward linguistic prestige and codification. Courts reward codification and adjudicable language. By contrast, scientific, medical and multilingual operational domains reward linguistic and terminological scalability along with cross-market interoperability.

Seen through that lens, LatAm Spanish is neither elegant nor prescriptively governed, but it is the only Spanish that can be neutralized at the right altitude and deployed across countries, industries and professional domains with the least editorial resistance.  In practice, scalability wins, and LatAm Spanish certainly provides it.

As such, LatAm Spanish succeeds as the language nobody speaks and the only one that everyone can use.

Important operational note: Whether or not a single variant is suitable across distant regions depends on the nature of the content and the target audience.  For anything that is not written at an academic level, it is usually wiser to stay close to the nearest regional standard.  For example, materials written in non-academic register intended for use in Spanish-speaking Africa, would be better served by using Iberian Spanish as the pivot reference instead of LatAm Spanish.