>>13669373Just like Blastoise, the Shellfish Pokemon.
I know his names reference hedgehogs in those languages, but I think that's for the sake of portmanteau ease and familiarity with the audience. Chespin looks A LOT more like a porcupine than a hedgehog, being a spiny, rodent-like critter. He lacks the snout you'd expect from a hedgehog, and he has those buck teeth instead of little prickly ones. Plus porcupines can stand bipedally.
Will Chespin become more like a hedgehog when he grows up? Or more like a porcupine? Or will he resemble a completely different animal, like a glyptodont or a bear or whatever the fuck else? I don't know, but in his base form he looks like a porcupine, and many languages use the same words interchangeably for porcupine as they do for hedgehog.
Also, the Spanish for porcupine is "puercoESPIN", literally "spiny pig". Animal names are fucked anyway, no one cares about taxonomic relationships over what it looks like.
