Imagine, if you will, the foreign student of English, fed a diet of solely Standard American Dialect, say, by a teacher from the West Coast of the United States.

Our student speaks good English. Not perfect, but still very good English and has just been sent to New York City for a month of personal and professional business.

The only problem is that he can’t understand a thing anyone says.

Cut to the present tense, and here I am in Lima, a speaker of Spanish as a foreign language very much accustomed to the classical, uninflected speech of Colombia. By contrast, Limeña Spanish has all the guttural power and force of Brooklyn “fuggedaboutit” English and the mouth shape of a Polish butcher trying to get his mouth around American vowels.

Limeñas like to say that of all Latin Americans they speak the purest form of Spanish on the continent. They say this is because the Viceroy lived here for three hundred years, that this was the capital of a vast empire.

That may be. It may also be that New York City is the capital of a vast American empire.

Is there a correlation between capital cities and muscular, unintelligible language?