"Spanish" a misnomer, diverse language

By Julia Lukomnik     12/4/08 6:00pm

There is no such thing as Spanish. If living in Guatemala, Peru and Chile during the last eight months has taught me anything, it is this: There's Guatemalan, Peruvian, Chilean, Argentinean, Bolivian, Uruguayan and so forth, but no "Spanish," except for maybe in Spain.For those of you who are confused, as you have a right to be, let me give an example: if I told a non-Chilean Spanish speaker, mi pololo estaba ponceando con lolitas cuando fue a caretear, ¿cachai? it's a safe bet that he or she would have no idea that I was trying to say, "When my boyfriend went out partying he was making out with lots of teenage girls, do you get that?" And if I told someone in Central America Nacio la gwawa en la chacra he or she wouldn't understand that I was saying, "The baby was born in the country." And that's just the vocabulary. How about accents - where Spaniards use lisps and Argentineans sound like Italians? Or grammar - in which Chileans terminate tu verbs with -i or how tu barely exists between Guatemalans?

Where these vocabulary, accent and grammar differences come from is fascinating from a cultural and linguistic standpoint. Let's take the first example. Some of the words are purely Chilean genus - pololo, which means boyfriend (novio, what many of us learned as the word for boyfriend, means "fiancé"), caretear, which means to go partying and poncear, which means, loosely, to make out. But some words have incredible outside influences that Chileans took and reworked to become an integral part of their language. Lolita, a word used to mean a teenage or adolescent girl, comes from the famous Nabokov novel of the same name where the main female character is a twelve-year-old. ¿Cachai?, which means "Did you catch that?" in references to understanding something, comes from the English word "catch." In no other countries are these words present, because it is Chile's specific relationship with the outside world that has brought them to existence.

In other cases country-specific vocabulary may come from internal sources. I'm referring here to indigenous populations. In Peru, Chile and Bolivia it would be common to hear the second example - nacio la gwawa en la chacra - because both gwawa and chacra come from Quecha, the language of the Incas. While the Incas spanned from Ecuador to Chile, they never made it past South America, so if you asked someone in Mexico how to say the same sentence, it's certain he or she would tell you something different.

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In Argentina "Spanish" is spoken like Italian because, well, there's a big Italian influence. In Guatemala many men will not use tu between each other because tu has come to take a homosexual connotation. Instead they use vos, a practice that is leading to the slow extinction of tu in Guatemalan. All over the vast Spanish-speaking world the same processes of language individualization have taken and are taking place, pulling the Spanish spoken in these countries further and further apart.

My point in writing this article is to point out that "Spanish" should be viewed not as a unified language, but as a set of dialects - mutually intelligible manners of speaking within a language. This may be something linguists are already doing, but it needs to also be something that anyone studying or teaching "Spanish" recognizes. Especially living in Texas for the majority of the year, it's easy to familiarize oneself with the Mexican dialect and assume that's all there is to know. But in reality, there's so much more. And who doesn't want to cachar todo, understand everything?

Julia Lukomnik is a Baker College junior and abroad in Chile.

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