Once, when I was finishing up my undergrad in Spanish, a group of fellow language majors got together for a forum on traveling abroad. We had been asked by a professor to talk to younger students about our experiences studying in different countries: dealing with homesickness, what to pack, the cultural differences to expect, etc. I was excited to relate my stories about living in Buenos Aires, the capital city of Argentina, and how influential the trip had been in shaping my (hitherto) narrow worldview. A classmate of mine that I had met in a Spanish conversation forum was presenting as well. We had both been in South America at the same time (the Southern Cone, to be more specific), she in Chile and I in Argentina. Knowing this, I greeted her in Spanish. What I wasn’t expecting was her wildly foreign response:
“¿Cómo etai po?”
I did a double take, wondering if I had confused her for a Portuguese student, if I had misheard her, or if she was just insane (the most probable solution). I had anticipated a very common Spanish greeting:
“¿Cómo estás?”( How are you?)
Instead, she spoke to me in what I assumed was a different language altogether. As she continued, my certainty in that assumption only grew stronger.
“Mi pololo y yo carrateábamo-, pero el weón se puso borracho, tomó diez chelah, ¿cachai?”
Pololo? I thought. Weón? Cachai? She sounded out of breath as well, and where there was supposed to be an ‘s’ she eliminated the sound completely. Our professor thankfully interrupted us, and told us it was time to begin.
“Al tiro”
She responded. At the shot? I thought.
The forum started and we spent the evening retelling our stories. I recounted some of my favorites: the wine tasting in Mendoza, seeing the famed waterfalls of Iguazú, whale watching in Puerto Madryn. Then it was my friend’s turn.
“Chile is such an incredible place, but I have to say, once I got there, I had no idea what anyone was saying.”
That makes two of us, I thought. Then she began to describe what had historically made Chilean Spanish sound like such gibberish (to me anyway).
The Spanish language reached a huge fork in the road around 1492, when good old Chris Columbus sailed that blue ocean of his. Castilian Spanish (Spanish spoken in the Iberian Peninsula), with all of its regional dialects and sister languages, remained in the peninsula. However, in the freshly ‘discovered’ New World, it blended and bred and mixed with the indigenous languages to create what is known today as American Spanish.
American Spanish is further divided into six distinct regions, each with its own sub dialects and unique vocabulary. With a basic idea of world history and geography, it’s quite easy to understand why each region developed distinctly. Mexican Spanish is classified by the huge presence of indigenous tribes adding to its vocabulary and rhythm. Caribbean and Central American Spanish has isolated islands and unique native populations. Andean Pacific Spanish is influenced by the Inca tribes and separated by mountain highlands and dense jungle. Plata River Spanish is heavily influenced by Southern European immigrants. And then, standing alone and apart from its peers: Chilean Spanish. Surprisingly, CS received its very own classification, despite being considered as and compared to its neighbors in Argentina and Uruguay.
Andalusian conquistadores from southern Spain (Sevilla, specifically) brought their own unique form of Spanish, or castellano, to the western edge of South America in the 1500s. From there, it fell into a melting pot with the languages of the indigenous populations then thriving all along the coast, primarily Quechua and Mapudungun, but also with Rapa Nui (on Easter Island), Huilliche, Central Aymara, Kawesqar and Yamana. Traces of Quechua, the language of the Incan Empire, can be seen in many plant and animal names, and has remained in the everyday vernacular of most Chileans. Words such as achuntar, chilla, canco, and callampa all stem from Quechua. Mapudungun, while less extensively used, is also nominally present in words such as luma, cahuín, copihue and culpeo. Lunfardo and Coa, slang developed by the lower classes and criminals of the Southern Cone in the 19th and 20th centuries, left a lasting legacy in Chilean lexicon with words such as bacán (awesome), gil (fool), and echar la foca (literally to throw the seal, but meaning to treat someone severely). Even English contributed to the development of the Chilean dialect, with English words being represented orthographically with Spanish phonetics: jaibón (high born), overol (overalls) and budín (pudding), to name a select few.
But not all word choices can be attributed to outside influences. Some are just pure Chilean, known as chilenismos, or Chilenisms. Po, an interjection inserted at random, has no significant meaning and is added any and everywhere. Expressions such as sí, po¸and no, po (yes and no, respectively), literally have the same meaning as their equivalents sí and no. Al tiro (at the shot) means right away. Pololo, polola, and pololear (boyfriend, girlfriend, and dating) are pure Chilean at its finest. And the question ¿Cachai?, meaning Do you understand/get it?, remains as Chilean as it gets.
Chilean Spanish is further distinguished by certain grammatical structures and physical features. The use of the formal Spanish pronoun vosotros has worked its way into spoken Chilean Spanish, with the pronoun vos used in place of the 2nd person familiar tú pronoun, and a corresponding change in the verb endings. For example, tú estás (you are) becomes vos estai. Tú sabes, tú vienes and tú hablas (you know, you come and you speak, respectively) are transformed into vos sabís, vos venís, and vos hablái. To further confuse the matter, Chilean Spanish allows its speakers not one, but six distinct ways of saying “you are”. Going from the most informal to the least: vos soi, vos erís, tú soi, tú erís, tú eres, usted es. Word choice and pronunciation are largely indicative of socioeconomic status, as well as geographic location. Spoken Spanish on the Pacific coast is considerably different from population centers near the Andean eastern borders. What’s more, a linguistic phenomenon known as hypercorrection has stratified the Chilean language economically, wherein wealthier parents, in an attempt to ensure their children aren’t perceived as uneducated or from a lower class, relentlessly police their spoken language to the point of altering its original state to something unrecognizable.
After hearing my friend relate all this information to the forum, the fog was (somewhat) lifted, and I started to realize that she wasn’t speaking a different language, but rather a unique version of Spanish, rich with history and geography and beautiful in its singularity. I still can’t understand it.
¿Cachai po?