Tom Cruise speaks in Spanish to Portuguese speaking Brazilian crowd
The news:
Tom Cruise was recently in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to promote his new film Valkyrie. He spoke to the audience with a few words in Spanish, saying ‘hola’ and ‘gracias’ in an attempt to endear himself to the local population. However, he only displayed his ignorance, unaware that in Brazil the population is Portuguese speaking.To add insult to injury, he later expressed his fondness for the tango, which is a Latin dance, not from Brazil, but with origins in neighbouring Argentina.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,487451,00.html
Behind the news:
While clustering countries, particularly by region, is both necessary and pragmatic from a business standpoint, it is still important to bear in mind regional differences. This is an obvious case of regional variation – a completely different language is spoken in Brazil vs. the rest of South America with which it shares borders. But many people are not aware that there are differences in the Spanish spoken between countries in much of Latin America, both in terms of grammar and vocabulary. The same is true in the Middle East region, where again, we often see a broad clustering of nations with little note of variances in dialect and culture for example between the Gulf states, Egypt, and Lebanon!