This thesis aims to highlight recent developments in the spoken Spanish of educated speakers, and challenges the relevance of published accounts of what currently constitutes standard spoken Spanish. Based on a large case-study of predominantly upper-middle class speakers (largely diplomatic corps and newsreaders), it proves, by means of phonetic analysis, that linguistic variables considered to represent non-standard speech are increasingly used and accepted by such speakers. The data upon which these findings were founded were obtained by means of taped recordings of televised newscasters over a three year period, and interviews involving a variety of reading tasks and introspection. The analysis points to the significance of age, gender, education and socio-economic background in accounting for differences between speakers. Nonetheless, differences are outweighed by similarities. All speakers were found to produce many and varied non-standard phonetic realizations. This thesis shows that the existing descriptions -or more clearly prescriptions- of contemporary spoken standard Spanish need to be revised in the light of the enormous gap between official accounts, and the reality of spoken Spanish among those regarded as being representative of the most prestigious spoken Spanish.