Laura Harrison

TEFL Course Advisor

Cactus Worldwide Ltd

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I recently came across a blog that my colleague, Alex Wolfson, wrote some time ago about the differences in the Spanish language spoken throughout the world. It seems that it would be a good idea to share it ...

Thursday, for some reason or other, is usually the quietest day of the week in the Cactus Language team for new bookings, so it is a day when I usually dedicate time to reading and replying to customer feedback questionnaires. The other day I was going through them and came across some rather frustrating comments. A client of ours had written that, while he had enjoyed his course in Buenos Aires, and had got on very well with his host family, he had not found the course useful as the Spanish spoken in Buenos Aires is Porteño Spanish and is therefore only useful in Argentina and nowhere else!

It is true that Spanish varies greatly from country to country and, in Spain, from region to region. From the thick and fast speech of Andalucia to the up and down lilt of Caribbean and the Spanish with an Italian accent of Argentina. The accents, vocabulary and pronunciation vary greatly. I learned my Spanish in Peru where people speak quite slowly, don’t lisp their c’s or z’s and where the language is quite easy to understand. When I bussed in non-stop 24 hours to the Chilean border I felt like I was listening to another language. “Ella e’ tu polola?” they said of my then girlfriend. What did polola mean? Turns out it meant girlfriend. “Com e’tay po huevon”, the hostal owner’s son asked me in the morning. Apparently it means how are you doing mate.

My first week or so in Chile was hard to understand for me and for my Peruvian girlfriend! However, once we got used to the slang, the differences in pronunciation and the way Chileans seem to miss out the first consonant of most words, it really became another fun part of discovering the country. After all, when you travel you want to immerse yourself in all aspects of the culture of another country; taste the food, see the beauty of the buildings and parks and hear the language as it is spoken there. There can be no doubt that the language is very different in Chile to any other country, but the same is true of Argentina, Costa Rica, Cuba, and Mexico (where my Spanish colleague Diana recently had problems understanding the language at times).

When you learn Spanish, English, French or any language, you learn one form of it, but for any language which is spoken widely it is important to be prepared for other forms of the language to be different in other regions or countries - but it is also important to remember that it IS the same language.

The beauty of language is that it is an organic thing and develops in many ways to ease communication and its variation can reveal much about a particular area’s culture. As language learners we must embrace these differences and enjoy whichever form of a language we are presented with, remembering that a different accent is just another rich challenge on the never-ending journey of language study.