in Castilian Spanish pronounced differently in "pan" than in "papa"?

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Oct 8, 2018 at 23:47	comment	added	user0721090601		@basketballfan22 English dialects can substantially vary those pronunciations. It's possible that some speakers use a so-called broad A for pan if they have the TRAP-BATH split —I'm not an expert on which words fall on which side—, in which case pan would have the same sound as flan. The -an for flan in Spanish should sound roughly like the -on of the English word con said in an American accent, and absolutely nothing like -an in the English word can said in an American accent.
Oct 8, 2018 at 20:53	comment	added	philomathic_life		@guifa, thanks for the information. I'm not sure why some Spanish speakers claim "flan" should be pronounced similar to "gone" in English while other Spanish speakers claim "flan" should be pronounced closer to how "pan" is pronounced in English.
Oct 5, 2018 at 15:42	comment	added	user0721090601		Just to supplement a bit, the Spanish vowels do demonstrate in some dialects some noticeable allophonic variation. Post-tonic unstressed vowels in particular can suffer some changes (Andalusian Spanish for instance). But AFAIK in all dialects, a tonic A will have effectively the same realization as any other tonic A, wherever that may be for a given speaker.
Oct 4, 2018 at 20:28	vote	accept	philomathic_life
Oct 4, 2018 at 20:23	comment	added	user6726		The best comparison in English could be Don, gone, but I pronounce "cot" and "caught" the same, and you need a speaker that keeps them distinct. And then you need a Spanish speaker who is fluent in that dialect.
Oct 4, 2018 at 19:41	comment	added	philomathic_life		Can this also be explained as the same formant and phoneme with just different pitches? I have no reason to believe these individuals are phonological experts, so perhaps their pronunciation claims are a result of auditory deficiencies as well.
Oct 4, 2018 at 19:37	comment	added	philomathic_life		I have a Peruvian co-worker and Spanish co-worker that both pronounced it similarly to the way I hear it in the links I posted, so I think my auditory perception and overall ineptitude in phonology is to blame more than imperfect audio recordings. I realize that this is somewhat tangential and nothing short of studying phonology in depth will truly answer my question, but online I found Spanish-speaking individuals claiming they pronounce the word "flan" like "lawn" in English and other Spanish speaking individuals claiming they pronounce "flan" like the English word "pan".
Oct 4, 2018 at 19:15	history	answered	user6726	CC BY-SA 4.0