El castellano, el vosotros y la distinción

Beware… this post is a little geeky! If you don’t speak Spanish or don’t like languages like I do, you might not be interested in this post. You might learn something new though!

Spanish is a pluricentric language, meaning that it is spoken in many different places and there is no one standard version. For example, the Spanish spoken in Spain, which is typically called el castellano or Castilian Spanish, is different from the one spoken in Mexico or in Argentina. There are differences even between individual regions in Spain. Most of these regional differences tend to be small vocabulary differences, especially when it comes to slang or curse words, but there are also some major differences in pronunciation and pronoun usage. Even with these major differences, however, individual versions and dialects of the languages are still mutually intelligible, meaning that speakers of the various dialects can understand each other.

In the United States, we typically study a Latin American version of the language like from Mexico or a more neutral one that focuses on the shared characteristics between the types of Spanish. We might touch on some aspects of the different countries, but we do not really go that much into depth. As a result, I was definitely a little surprised by two of the major grammatical differences used here in Spain: el vosotros and la distinción.

Like most Romance language, Spanish has two main ways to express the English idea of “you”: a formal version (Usted) and an informal version (tú), similar to French’s vous vs. tu and German’s Sie vs. Du. The formal version is typically used where there’s a power distance, such as between teacher and student or employee and customer, or when there is a desire to be extra polite, while the informal version shows familiarity and closeness. Simple enough, right? The only complication for Spanish is in the plural form of you. In Latin American Spanish, you just use the formal plural, Ustedes, for everything, which happens to use the same verb form (conjugation) as the third person plural “they” (ellos), making it very straightforward. We were always taught that was an informal plural, vosotros, that was used in Spain, but there was never much emphasis placed on it so we just assumed it was something used in frequently like the “you guys” or “youse” that you hear every now and then in places like New Jersey.

We get to Spain and it becomes clear that this assumption was very much false. Add a very open culture to the fact that everyone wants to be viewed as young in Spain and you can see see why they use vosotros practically everywhere here. From the first time we talked to our program coordinators (¿cómo estáis?) and host family (esto es vuestra casa) to the professors in our classes (¿comprendéis?) and people on the street (¿dónde iréis esta noche?), it was everywhere we went. Advertisements even use it! I was definitely glad I always paid attention to our conjugation tables and didn’t just skip over learning that verb form. It’s weird to actually see it in practice, but it’s nice in a way, because we’re finally using all six conjugation forms that we always had to write out in the tables.

The other thing that surprised me, maybe even more than the wide use of vosotros, was la distinción. Yes, we were always told that Spaniards had a “lisp” where they pronounced c and z like the English “th”. This made perfect sense when Nacho from Spain revealed that his real name was Ignacio, pronounced Ig-na-thio, in our Spanish instructional videos in high school. It even makes sense when people say Bar-the-lo-na to sound cute and more authentic… but when people start believing you actually speak Spanish and then give you weird looks after you pronounce gracias, one of the first Spanish words you ever learned, as gra-see-as instead of their gra-thee-as for thank you, you realize how many times you pronounce the letters c and z like an s in everyday speech. In Spain, all of those instances of the soft c are supposed to be pronounced as th! Needless to say, we’re still struggling with catching that little slip-up.

These experiences really show that you can’t truly understand or speak a language until you live it and spend time in a country where people speak it natively.