Is Latin America part of "The West"?

[curupira]

^ São Paulo state received the highest share, along with Southern Brazil. Italian descendants are also important in Espírito Santo (%) and in Minas Gerais (in absolute numbers in this state).

[Meerkat.86]

Italians (mostly from northern Italy) have contributed a lot to Brazil developement.

Yes.
More than a half of Italians who have moved to Brazil were northern Italians,
mostly Venetians.

[Arsen_]

Real data about argentinian population:

2/4 italian descent

So why then they speak Spanish and not Italian???

[Meerkat.86]

You know believe it or not there are parts of Europe that have slums too. Doesn't make them non-Western, does it?

I' ve never seen slums in Europe, they are extraneous to our culture. Since the postwar period we have developed a strong welfare state to reduce inequalities. And it happened everywhere, not only in those countries governed by social democrats. For an European would be unacceptable to live in a place like this

[Meerkat.86]

So why then they speak Spanish and not Italian???

because Italians who have emigrated to Argentina didn't speak Italian. They knew only dialects which were spoken in their regions.

[Peyrol]

So why then they speak Spanish and not Italian???

Because they were low classes peasant who known only local dialects.

Anyway, rioplatense spanish is heavy italianized in the pronunciation...and don't mention also the lunfardo, the old Buenos Aires dialect, wich was a lombard-neapolitan-spanish pidgin.

[Peyrol]

More info

An Italian Argentine (Spanish and Italian: italo-argentino) is a person born in Argentina of Italian ancestry. It is estimated up to 25 million Argentines have some degree of Italian descent (up to 60% of the total population).Italians began arriving in Argentina in great numbers from 1857 to 1940, totaling 44.9% of the entire immigrant population; more than from any other country (including Spain at 31.5%), and this migratory flow continued to the 1960s, with Italy also having the most emigrants to Argentina for the decades 1980–2000. Because of this, Italian descent is likely the largest ethnic heritage of Argentina's population, with about 20 million descendants.

Italian settlement in Argentina, along with Spanish settlement, formed the backbone of today's Argentine society. Argentine culture has significant connections to Italian culture in terms of language, customs and traditions.

According to Ethnologue, Argentina has more than 1,500,000 Italian speakers, making it the second most spoken language in the nation. In spite of the great many Italian immigrants, the Italian language never truly took hold in Argentina, in part because at the time the great majority of Italians spoke only their local Italian dialect and not the unified, standard Italian. This prevented any expansion of the use of the Italian language as a primary language in Argentina. The similarity of the Italian dialects with Spanish also enabled the immigrants to assimilate, by using the Spanish language, with relative ease.

Italian immigration from the second half of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century made a lasting and significant impact on the intonation of Argentina's vernacular Spanish. Preliminary research has shown that Rioplatense Spanish, and particularly the speech of the city of Buenos Aires, has intonation patterns that resemble those of Italian dialects (especially Neapolitan), and differ markedly from the patterns of other forms of Spanish.This correlates well with immigration patterns as Argentina, and particularly Buenos Aires, had huge numbers of Italian settlers since the 19th century. According to a study conducted by National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina, and published in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (ISSN 1366-7289). The researchers note that this is a relatively recent phenomenon, starting in the beginning of the 20th century with the main wave of Southern Italian immigration. Before that, the porteño accent was more similar to that of Spain, especially Andalusia.

Much of Lunfardo arrived with European immigrants, such as Italians, Spanish, Greek, Portuguese, and Poles. It should be noted that most Italian and Spanish immigrants spoke their regional languages and dialects and not standard Italian or Spanish; other words arrived from the pampa by means of the gauchos; a small number originated in Argentina's native population. Most sources believe that Lunfardo originated in jails, as a prisoner-only argot. Circa 1900, the word lunfardo itself (originally a deformation of lombardo in several Italian dialects) was used to mean "outlaw". Lunfardo words are inserted in the normal flow of Rioplatense Spanish sentences. Thus, a Spanish-speaking Mexican reading tango lyrics will need, at most, the translation of a discrete set of words, and not a grammar guide. Tango lyrics use lunfardo sparsely, but some songs (such as El Ciruja, or most lyrics by Celedonio Flores) employ lunfardo heavily. "Milonga Lunfarda" by Edmundo Rivero is an instructive and entertaining primer on lunfardo usage.[citation needed]

Examples:

Parlar - To speak (from the Italian parlare -to speak-)
Manyar - To know / to eat (from the Italian mangiare -to eat-)
Mina - Female (from the Italian femmina -Female-)
Laburar - To work (from Italian lavorare - to work-)
Fiaca - laziness (from the Italian fiacco -weak-)

Between about 1880 and 1900, Argentina received a large number of peasants who arrived with little or no schooling in the Spanish language. As those immigrants strove to communicate with the local criollos, they produced a variable mixture of Spanish with Italian and Italian dialects. This pidgin language was given the derogatory name cocoliche by the locals. Since the children of the immigrants grew up speaking Spanish at school, work, and military service, Cocoliche remained confined mostly to the first generation immigrants, and slowly fell out of use. The pidgin has been depicted humorously in literary works and in the Argentine sainete theater, e.g. by Dario Vittori.

[Brynhild]

Take my vote out please. Thanks.

[Arsen_]

because Italians who have emigrated to Argentina didn't speak Italian. They knew only dialects which were spoken in their regions.

Oh that's a really pity!
To my mind it would be great to have a Italian-speaking country outside of Italy.

[PeacefulCaribbeanDutch]

yes for the latin american countries, like Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina

they are their own form of West just like USA is west but not Europe.

However, African Carribean countries are not west, most lost their western influence and look similar to African countries with adobe brick huts and all that, what little western influence they had has been lost or is only being re-aquired again by copying local countries. Of course some basic western practices continue, but you can say that westen practices occur in Kenya, so I don't think that counts,

but Mexico, Uruguay ect. those certainly are a form of western culture.