Continental drift: Spanish across Latin America

I started the decade learning the art of translation and I ended it learning my own language. In 2019, I finally said goodbye to my office job and started my own translation business; but also, after many years working in the City, I needed an adventure too. Anyway, what better marketing than spreading business cards and the word on who I am and what I do across 10 countries? Alongside that, I believe that learning a language involves a lot more than learning its vocabulary or its grammar. It involves learning its values and its culture: and what better way to do this than visiting the countries where it is spoken?

Which is how my backpack, my laptop and I ended up travelling from London to Cuba all the way down to Patagonia…and how I ended up learning even more than I expected.

Spanish is spoken by about 8% of the world population, and the same percentage of the world’s online communication is in Spanish. This might not sound like a very big number, but when we translate that to 580 million people, the story changes. In fact, its 483 million native speakers make it the second most spoken mother tongue, the second most used in social media and the third most used language online. Added up like that, it starts to look much more impressive – and the 22 million people in 110 countries around the world who are currently studying Spanish must definitely think so.

Even in the UK, where language learning is far less popular than in most other countries, Spanish is one of the languages which is in demand, and it is perceived as among the most important languages for the future. That puts my decision to go to Latin America into context. In fact, I visited 10 of the 21 countries in the world where Spanish is the official language. Each of those 10 countries has their own forms of Spanish; and many have also kept links with the other languages spoken in that country before Spanish ever arrived. I covered huge distances (you could fit about 23 European countries into Mexico alone) and here are just some examples of what I encountered.

The first and the shortest stop was Cuba. I expected that the main influences on Cuban Spanish would be the island’s natural isolation, combined with the legacy of colonial Spanish and of the African languages spoken by enslaved people brought to Cuba. I knew that Taino, the native language before the arrival of the Spanish, was no longer spoken, so I didn’t expect it to have much influence on the Spanish that is spoken in Cuba today.

However, hugely to my surprise, the most fascinating aspect of Cuban Spanish for me did turn out to be Taino. In fact, words that come from Taino include hamaca (hammock) – and tabaco. I had not expected an extinct language still to have such a strong influence on its place of origin, let alone to be taken up worldwide. However, I must admit my favourite anecdote is finding myself trying to work out what guaniquiqui meant. I was extremely confused before I realised that this word, which came from the extinct indigenous language and which originally referred to a valuable natural fibre that was used to make shoes, is now used to talk about money. There is a whole story of linguistic and cultural history here, in just one word.

The next stage of my journey was Mexico. This was certainly a very interesting part of the journey as the Spanish spoken here has the highest number of speakers in the world. Surprisingly, though, it was both the most conservative and gracious variant, and one with a large number of Anglicisms. The so-called ‘archaisms’ were what I found the most astonishing. I would have loved to see my face the first time somebody said to me ‘para servir’ (‘here to serve’) instead of ‘gracias’ (‘thank you’) or ‘mande’ (‘at your command’) as a response to a simple ‘excuse me’.

At the same time as retaining these older forms of speech, Mexico has also incorporated new Anglicisms that don’t exist in Spain, which makes it a very eclectic and interesting variety of Spanish. English speakers might understand carro (car), elevador (lift) or computadora (computer) better than coche, ascensor and ordenador, but it took me a while to get used to them.

I only passed through Colombia briefly, but it was enough to realise that they have a very rich vocabulary for food. I even found myself in situations where I had to ask for the food menus in English, in order to understand what was actually on offer. Even more interestingly, I learned that the Colombian accent is the least distinctive of all Latin American accents, and so Colombian Spanish is used to dub English films that are then redistributed around the whole of Latin America.

From Colombia I made my way into Ecuador. I was surprised to find that such a small country (it is one of the smallest in South America) has 11 indigenous languages living alongside Spanish. The Ecuadorians also use grammatical constructions and a phrase order that you do not find in other forms of Spanish and that are explained by Quechua or Aymara constructions.

I spent a lot of time in the Andes learning a bit of Quechua, in the hope of gaining a greater understanding of its impact on the Spanish language. One of the most curious linguistic features, I found, was the way possessive pronouns are duplicated. For most of us, it would be thoroughly confusing to be told ‘this is Raisa’s article is hers’ instead of saying ‘this is Raisa′s article’. At the very least it would make one think that the speaker was questioning whether it really was Raisa’s article; and on top of that, there are the issues of gender and number, which make it even harder for a speaker who is unused to it. Yet perhaps even more surprisingly, I learned that a number of terms have not only entered the Spanish language but made it all the way to Spain and are still in common use. For example, I have used the word cancha (tennis court or football field) without realising that this word came from Quechua.

My next stop after Ecuador was meant to be Peru, but then I heard about Guarani and I changed my itinerary to go to Paraguay first. Paraguay is the only Spanish speaking country where more people speak an indigenous language than Spanish. As a linguist I found this a success story: two languages that have lived alongside and embraced each other. It’s a very different story in Peru, where less than 20% of the population speaks Quechua; yet even here there is a resurgence, with a PhD student submitting her thesis in Quechua last year (and gaining top marks for it). And Peru also has 47 other indigenous languages, 21 of which are officially listed as ‘at risk’ by the United Nations.

My last and favourite stop before the end was in Argentina. I am so fascinated by the Spanish in Argentina that I could write an entire article about it, but I will just single out one snippet for now: Lunfardo. In some ways Lunfardo is a parallel to the Cockney rhyming slang originally from the East End of London. It is a slang that originated among the working-class communities of Buenos Aires at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. With the constant influx of Spanish and Italian immigrants and the birth of Tango, Lunfardo thrived and expanded to other social classes to make it what it is today: a hilarious slang that alters the order of syllables. So instead of ?Qué calor! (for ‘It is very hot’), speakers would say ?Qué lorca! to complain about the heat. (However, it can be just as unintelligible as Cockney if you don’t speak it when they refer to bondi to talk about the public bus or tacheros to talk about taxi drivers.)

My journey started in Cuba as a Spanish woman with little understanding of the diversity of the Spanish language in Latin America. It finished in Patagonia with a mind full of the richness of the Spanish language in all its varieties and a soul full of stories and anecdotes. In the process I read food menus in my own language without actually understanding a word, and made a whole room laugh in response to a simple question. Most importantly, I have not only learned a wide range of new words; I have learned so much about my own language.