ARGENTINE SPANISH DICTIONARY

Languages, like all human products, are subjected to changes overtime. And when a language such as Spanish, in view of its eventful and long history [...] has come to be a thousand years there will inevitably be differences manifesting along and across the broad geography in which it settled.

José Luis Moure
University of Buenos Aires - CONICET - Academia Argentina de Letras

Unlike many dictionaries of Argentinismos (that suggest the idea of a fixed inventory of Spanish words to which one could attach an “expansion pack” of Argentinian slang) this dictionary presents Spanish as it was constituted by the Argentine standard. It includes words shared by other Spanish speaker countries excluding those ones exclusive of other dialects. The different meanings of the words are ordered according to the frequency of use in Argentina.

It´s an essential tool for all those who are living here or who would like to adopt our variety. To start using it click on the link below:

ARGENTINE SPANISH DICTIONARY

SPANISH in America: a succinct study.

Uncountable times I have heard that the way porteños speak is different from “the rest of America”. This is probably due to the (mistaken) belief that Argentina is the only country with voseo. The same happens when it comes to the pronunciation for “y” and “ll”. For many people there are only two ways to speak Spanish in America: like Buenos Aires inhabitants or like “the rest of America”.

This idea is so deep-rooted that, every time, I have a hard work convincing people (who, after all my attempts, will give me that suspicious look) that there is no such thing. There are more dialects coexisting in America than I will ever know. Each of them, different.

It would be an impossible task to give a complete report of what America dialectal situation is like. Instead, I will simply provide (without becoming punctitious at all) a few examples to prove the variety and complexity of American Spanish dialects.

1- Regarding pronunciation, I can easily think of:

- 6 different ways to pronounce “y”:

/ʃ/ – as in she

/ʒ/ – as in vision

/ʤ/ – as in June

/ʤi:/ – as the name for “g”

/ʧ/ – as in chin

/I:/ – as in see

- 3 for “r”

/l/ – as in leg

/ʒ/ – as in vision

/r/ – the most known pronunciationl.

- 3 for “b”

/b/ – as in bed

/u:/ – as in too

/g/ – as is got

- And 3 for “s”

/ʃ/ – as in she

/s/- as in so

/Ɵ/ – as in thin

Morphology:

The following map shows (as reliably as Wikipedia allows) those countries where vos is used.

In dark blue and blue, countries with voseo predominance (except for Chile where they use vos in a different way). In green, countries where vos is used in some regions. In sky blue, countries where is almost unused. In red, countries where only tuteo exists.

Technically, only Cuba and Spain don´t have “vos” among their available forms.

Another interesting nuance is the opposition “tú/vos” vs. “usted”. The most spread use says that “usted” is formal and “tú/vos” are informal. However, this ignores the fact that in Colombia people use “usted” as an intimate and familiar form. In Buenos Aires, instead, “usted” implies aging but not always formality; several times it´s used as a friendly form and not few times it´s a sign of “flirting”.

At the same time, in the places where both “tú” and “vos” are used, they are not interchangable. Each has its own context of usage.

Vocabulary:

I chose “remera” just to take a very common word. The following chart shows how many different words exist for the same object according to the countries.

 

I could continue for ever but I will stop here. Don´t panic.

Not even us, as native speakers, know (let alone use) every one of these variants. A common grammar (with this I am meaning syntaxis) let us understand each other in a very high percentage, high enough to leave vocabulary variation as the only one aspect to be learnt. We become more and more familiar with it as we are being in touch with movies, people, songs, news, places, etc: understanding other slang is a process that needs culture contact, ergo, time. However, even then, when we get to understand it, we don´t change our way to speak to talk to someone with a different dialect.

I, as porteño, am not expected to change “vos” for “tú” when talking to a Venezuelan guy, neither I expect a Peruvian to say “sho” as in Buenos Aires; Colombian people are free to use “usted” in a colloquial and familiar way, and so on and so forth…

So if we, native Spanish speakers, are not able, therefore, not requiered to know and to use every single existing form in America at a certain time, why should a student?

ON LANGUAGE CORRECTNESS AND INCORRECTNESS.

“Everyday language” is not innocent or neutral. It is the language of Western metaphysics, and it carries with it [...] a considerable number of presuppositions [...] which are knotted into a system.

Jaques Derrida, On Grammatology.

For most of people born and raised in a literate environment, thinking of a language becomes an equivalent of thinking of its writing: despite the fact that writing, as we know it now, is historically much more recent than orality;  despite we don´t learn our mother tongue by means of writing; despite the predominance of oral language in our lives, writing is often the basis of any reasoning when it comes to reflect on language.

This “writing-centrism” has made us believe that language has an immutable presence, that it exists regardlessly people who speak it, just like writing. However it doesn´t. Homogeneous societies are an ideal: variation is a constitutive part of every language.

Unfortunately, the only reference most people often  have about linguistics is the one they have studied at school or while learning a second language: in both cases, language is taught as a prescriptive grammar concerned with rules for correct usage.

However, there is no such thing as correctness neither is there and absolute truth in what grammar explains: prescriptive grammar is merely one among hundreds of theories about language (not precisely the most popular between linguists) and it´s been developed for didacticism´s sake, after making a decision on which one, out of millions of slangs, is going to become the standard language.

Why is that, if no society has ever been homogeneous in terms of slangs, there is such a great effort made to keep this idea?

Because language is, among other things, a tool of power. (Click here for another post on the subject).

What is claimed to be the “correct language” is nothing more than just another slang (not that surprisingly it´s often high class slang), chosen to be the archetype of the language and imposted via educational system onto the rest of people. Behind every grammar there is a linguistic policy. It is normally taught as neutral to evade controversies on why one specific slang should be more adequate to represent the whole community than others.

To criticize one specific slang in terms of incorrectness is simply to claim that your own slang, and this always means your own belonging group, is better than others  to represents the society as a whole but there is no objective validation for that since there is no objectivity in grammar.

BEYOND THE BIG 3

I few months ago while I was reading some posts on a expats forum, I came across one I found interesting.

It was written by a guy who was fed up with meeting girls who, with few if no exception, would ask him what he called “the big 3″ namely:

1. Where are you from?
2. How old are you?
3. Why are you in Buenos Aires?

He was concerned about either “how to meet a quality girlfriend in Buenos Aires?” or where to find “places where Argentine women speak both Spanish and English past “The Big 3″?”

Within the frame of Conversation Analysis (CA) Amparo Tusón wrote a work that might shed light on this issue  from a scientific perspective.

She had been invited to this party in Berkeley, California where she was studying for her Doctorate.  While she was there, the following conversation took place:

- Hi! My name is “x”. What´s your name?

- Hi! My name is Amparo.

- Oh! Amparo! And where do you come from?

- From Barcelona, Spain.

- Oooooh! REALLY? That´s wonderful, I heard that it´s a beautiful city!

- Yes, oh, I like it very much, too.

- And what is your field?

- Linguistic Antropology

- Ooooh! REALLY? How interesting!

After which the person said “Ok. I will see you around” and left.

More or less the same conversation happened a few times. She was a little frustrated because of  what she found an insincere display of interest to be left some minutes later. After a while, she changed her strategy: she begun to answer people´s questions but in addition, she would ask the same kind of questions. It came up that, in this way, she could keep longer and more substantial conversations.

With this example she briefly illustrates 2 important points of CA:  (1) Conversation is also governed by rules; (2) speakers of a language not only have to be competent in using grammar rules but also to be comunicatively competent.

If you think of those daily conversations you have with people, especially the ones you don´t know (the waiter in a restaurant, a girl you have just met in a bar, someone on the street whom you want to ask for the time) but also your friend who has just bought a brand new car, etc. you will find a pattern, if not fixed at least highly standarized. This pattern is so pervasive that we only notice it when someone tries to go beyond that pattern, since we find it inadequate. I remember when I first moved to Entre Ríos province from Buenos Aires, and I asked someone on the street: “Disculpame, ¿tenés hora? (Excuseme, could you tell me what´s the time?)”. His reaction was very unexpected for me: he made an angry face and said “Buen día, ¿no? (Good morning, in the first place)”. As I found out later, in Entre Ríos is very rude not to say “Buen día, buenas tardes or buenas noches” before asking someone a question. So I didn´t mean to be rude but I was, because of my incompetence in their conversational rules.

So what is this “big 3″ thing about? It is simply the rules governing a “speech act ” we could call “speaking with a foreigner for the first time” as it works for Argentinians (at least porteños).

Every culture has its own rules for communicative situations. Just like Amparo´s experience, once you know how it works you will be able to go further and deeper in a conversation.

So it is not about the “quality” of Argentinian women (which is a negative value judgement and a prejudice) but about a person not being in possession of certain social rules.

The “big 3″ is a path you have to walk along in order to see what´s on the other side.

THE BRAIN-AS-COMPUTER METAPHOR

If you want to teach a computer to play chess (…) the old model is ok; but if you´re interested in understanding real intelligence, you have to deal with the body-

Rolf Pfeifer, director of the artificial intelligence lab at the University of Zurich.

After the modern computer advent in the historical stage and especially after the artificial intelligence development was made known, human brain started to be understood as a computer.

This way to think of ourselves has been long ruled out, not only because mind and brain are much more complex than hard and soft but also because it´s precisely the split idea of mind/brain which has been overthrown. However, as Spanish teacher, I have seen and heard things that made me think that this idea is still instilled in people, at least when it comes to language learning.

Thinking of language as a software to be installed in our brains, following some steps in a certain order, makes us erroneously conclude that:

- the correct performance of every step leads to the following one,
- the faster I get to perform every step, the faster my brain will run correctly the programm.

- if there is a problem while running the programm, then there is something wrong with the computer or with the installing process.

Let´s consider the following frequent questions:

- Why is that I can´t use the verbs correctly when speaking if I can do the grammar excercises in the book with no problem?

- Why, if I understand the rules, I make mistakes?

- Why do I remember the conjugation when I study the verbs but I keep getting them mixed while speaking?

- Why after 15 weeks of intensive lessons, after going through all the grammar subjects I still can´t speak.

- Why, as and advanced student, do I make beginners´ mistakes?

- Why does my class mate speak better than me if we are in the same level?

Brain is not a computer. It is, before anything else, a part of our body and just like a muscle it needs to be trained and even more: it is essential for its correct functioning to change the type of exercise not to let it accustomed and therefore, lazy.

ESPAÑOL or CASTELLANO (Beyond the problem of nomenclature)

It´s been further discussed the way in which we have to call the language spoken in Spain and most of Latin America. If we pay attention to the etymology of the two available terms, namely español and castellano, we find that the former refers to Spain and the ladder to Castile (also in Spain).

Nowadays,  castellano is used more frequently to refer only to the language as spoken in Spain, and español to the language as it is spoken in Latin America.

However, there is something hidden behind this distinction. If it were all about a title, it wouldn´t be necessary to get to an agreement about it just as there is no discussion about whether to call table “a table” or something different. So, why is it so important?

The thing is language is much more than a mere tool to communicate with each other but it is rooted so deep inside us and it is such a part of us that it becomes very hard to take distance from it and grasp its nature in all its complexity.

Language is also a flag. With this, I mean that the specific way in which a community (I am purposely avoiding the word “country” ) speaks is a symbol of the community itself, and its members can identify themselves as belonging to that community because (among other things) they share its dialect: Women don´t speak like men, children don´t speak like adults, country people don´t speak like city people, high class people don´t speak like low class people, Spaniards don´t speak like Peruvians, Spaniards don´t speak like other Spaniards, and so on and so forth.

The situation in Spain is the epitome of this. Why is that castellano is used to refer to Spanish as spoken in Spain? The reason has nothing to do with it being more appropriate in linguistics terms: it´s about the Basque people, the Catalans and the Galicians refusing to use the word español to call Spanish since they are Spaniard people too but they don´t speak the same language. So, the fight on the terminology arena is a political fight, in the first place.

If we examine the history of immigration, we will come across many other examples: millions of cases in which a certain group of immigrants wouldn´t speak their language, they wouldn´t encourage their sons and daughters to use it because it meant a shame to come from wherever they´d come from.

When it comes to language it is never really about grammar rules and vocabulary but about people.

If someone asked me how I´d call the language I speak, I´d answer that I speak Argentinian or even better: a femenine educated middle class variation of Porteño (which is one of the many dialectal variations of  Old Spanish), slightly affected by the five years I spent in Entre Ríos province but considerably influenced by me being a Liberal Arts student…

…or I´d simply say that I speak español… or castellano… given that none of them fairly represents the reality of the language I speak.

THOSE LOGICAL BUT FALSE RULES

In contrast to what many people think, teaching your own language as a  second language is not easy. Language is present in people´s lives in such a pervasive way that they frequently conclude that it works in an obvious way. Rules are logical and their exceptions are consequently logical too.

If you have worked as a language teacher you have probably noticed that things are not that obvious for your students and, more than once, they surely have asked questions you did not have answers to. If you haven´t done the experiment, well, you will have to trust me: language affairs are neither obvious nor simple.

Learning a language as you did when you were a child will never happen again. For this reason, we have grammar to try to bridge the gap between you and your chosen language.

However, grammar is logical to a fault, since it is always an abstraction of what really happens when people speak.

One of the most common mistakes is to use some simple and even logical rules that are useful to explain a few clear examples but exclude many others. Being simple makes these rules easy to remember and hard to change for more appropriate ones. Therefore, lots of mistakes fossilize in the mind of the students and it becomes a very complicated problem to correct.

The 3 most common examples of these logical but false rules:

1- Ser is used for permanent states and estar for temporary states. This rule does not explain why we say: Soy estudiante, está muerto, la fiesta es en mi casa, and many others.

2- Imperfecto is used for descriptions and Preterite, for one-time actions. The fallacious idea that Imperfecto is for longer periods than Preterite underlies this claim. Exceptions for this rule are: Juan no fue muy simpático ayer cuando hablamos; ayer te llamé todo el día, durante mi adolescencia salí muchísimo, etc.

3- It is impossible to list all the exceptions for the following rule: Subjunctive is used to express doubt, wishes or irreality.

Although it is true that as teacher, one cannot show grammar in all its complexity, with all its nuances at once, what we can do is dose out the knowledge throughout the course without instilling in the student the belief that things are simpler than they are. A language is a complex entity and one needs time to grasp it all.

Moral of the story: Don´t trust rules that seem to explain everything and… be patient.

VOS vs. TÚ

How troubled is the fact of choosing between “tú” and “vos”?

 

I consider that dilemma to be much more insignificant than it is generally thought:

 

Firstly, because there are formal differences in only two tenses: Indicative present and imperative mood -also in subjunctive present but is less usual-; and lastly, because no matter which form you choose, it does not represent an problem understanding or being understood by other Spanish speakers from other countries.

 

Which are these differences?

 

Indicative present:

- No irregularities, stress on the last sylable, change of the ending of -ir verbs.

      

               JUG-AR    QUER-ER    SENT- IR

tú      >    jueg - as    quier - es      sient -  es

vos    >    jug    – ás    quer  - és      sent  -  ís

 

Imperative mood:

- No irregularities, stress on the last sylable, change in the ending of -ir verbs.

 

               JUG-AR    QUER-ER    SENT- IR    VEN – IR 

tú      >    jueg - a      quier - e        sient -  e     ven

vos    >    jug    – á      quer  - é        sent  -  í      ven – í

 

So, if you consider the whole scene, it is not a big deal at all. 

 

Whom would I suggest to learn one form and whom, the other one? 

 

Well, I would encourage people on vacation to learn or use ”tú” conjugation, specially the ones who have already learnt it and who are staying here for little time and/or only for tourism; whereas, I would totally recommend “vos” forms to the following people:

 

- Tango lovers (Tango would not exist without “vos” and viceversa).

- The ones who move BA to study or work.

- People who want to connect with locals.

- Or simply too lazy students (“vos” is much more regular than “tú”).

 

Is one form more correct than the other one? (I will go into it in depth later)