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I love having my language skills minimized

I’ve discovered something in Spain (or perhaps in Valencia, which like many regions of Spain has its own special dialect; I’ve heard some, I’m not sure if they’re local, who sound like they’re speaking with a lisp, but it’s just their dialect) which I haven’t encountered anywhere else that I recall.

Specifically, I’ve run into Spaniards who take an entirely American approach to their native language. When they realize you don’t speak Spanish, they slow down and speak louder… but stick to Spanish. Because, of course, the problem is really just that I’m hard of hearing, not that all my language-learning efforts were for languages other than theirs.

Today, I ran into a friendlier guy. First he asked if I was German. (The word is similar to the French, “allemagne” or something like it.) Then if I was British. When I said I was American, he asked if I was from New York. Then I think he offered to sell me hashish. But maybe I misunderstood him.

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Posted by pjm on March 6, 2008 1:23 PM |

Comments

You’re a geek so I hope you’ll appreciate a little info dump. I learned some of this from high school Spanish and some of it from a Swedish (sic) diplomat I met at a party once. The language we call Spanish is more properly called Castilian, after the Spanish region of which it was once the dialect. Queen Isabella of Columbus fame was Queen of Castille; she married King Ferdinand of Aragon, and together they completed the reconquista and invented Spain.

The southeastern part of Spain, including Barcelona and Valencia, had a big enough army that its dialects got called a language: Catalan, after the region Catalonia of which Barcelona is the capital. Valencian is considered a dialect of Catalan, not of Castilian.

(An example of the difference is that in Castilian, Juan is spelled Juan; in Catalan it’s pronounced basically the same but spelled Joan, as in the surrealist painter Joan Miro.)

Finally, the dialect with the lisp is Andalusian, from Andalusia, the southern part of Spain, which includes Cordoba, Granada, and Seville. It’s usually considered a dialect of Castilian. Actually, Wikipedia says that it has its own subdialects, not all of which use the lisp: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seseo . I hadn’t known that.

Finally, yes, the Spanish word for “German” is “Aleman”, with an accent on the second ‘a’. (As you may know, the accent mark in Spanish only indicates stress, it doesn’t change pronunciation.) I’m not surprised that that was the guy’s first guess; my college roommate spent a semester in Martinique and reported that he was often taken for a German because he was very white but had manners and therefore couldn’t be an American. And that was back in 1999.

Posted by: Andy B | March 6, 2008 7:31 PM

Great background, Andy, thanks. The athletes with the “list” must have been Andalucian, as you say; there are quite a few good Spanish athletes from the Seville region. I noticed bridges on this morning’s run labeled with both “Pont” and “Puente” and many streets are labeled only in Valencian here. But I’ll quibble on one point: Barcelona is hardly south eastern Spain.

Posted by: pjm | March 7, 2008 1:34 AM

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