It’s the second time something like this happens to me.
Scene: a fashionable bar in East London.
Day and time: Wednesday, 9:00 PM
I’m talking with a dear Mexican friend and her Italian boyfriend. She’s speaking Spanish. She is loud and excited. She moves her hands a lot. This Spanish guy, from Asturias, makes eye contact with my friend and finds his way into the conversation. We talk for a while. The conversation takes place in the Spanish language.
Ernesto: You know what, the other day this Spanish guy told me I didn’t speak Spanish.
Guy from Asturias: Well, of course.
Ernesto: No, what I mean is, he said I didn’t speak Spanish.
Guy from Asturias: Well, that’s what I mean, you don’t.
Ernesto: My point precisely, I do speak Spanish.
Guy from Asturias: No, you speak mejicano.
Ernesto: There is no such a thing as “mexicano”. We speak Spanish. We were colonized by the Spaniards. 15th, 16th century, you know. The United Nations recognizes that Mexico is the nation with the largest Spanish-speaking population. Are you telling me I am Mexican and I don’t speak Spanish?
Guy from Asturias: Well, for a guy like me, from Spain, you don’t speak Spanish. You use expressions I know I will not understand.
Ernesto: But there are expressions you use I don’t understand either. There are differences, of course, but the national language of Mexico, the United Mexican States, the Mexican Republic, is “Spanish”. There are no “Mexican” dictionaries.
Guy from Asturias: Of course there are.
Ernesto: There are not. Mexicans speak Spanish. Colombians speak Spanish. Argentinians speak Spanish. Come on.
Guy from Asturias: I don’t care, I speak Español, you don’t.
Ernesto: I don’t get why you guys are not willing to accept we speak Spanish as well. People in the USA speak English. People in England speak English as well. Over there they say chips, here they say crisps. But it’s the same language. English.
Guy from Asturias: It’s not the same. You guys speak Mejicano.
Ernesto: …*sigh*
January 10, 2008 at 2:34 am
Surely you should have pointed out that there are plenty of words or phrases someone from Gijon might use that a Madrileno (I hope this is the right word) might not understand, much as my old friends from Yorkshire and I tend to use colloquial language that would completely perplex a Londoner?
January 10, 2008 at 3:04 am
I’ve had the same argument about both Spanish and English with some people at school… but don’t you think that if we people in the americas (and any other places where “Spanish” is spoken) one day agree and say “yes, we don’t speak Spanish” we would be giving a bigger blow to the arrogance of Spaniards and their sacred “Mendedez y Pelayo” authorized Spanish language?
I don’t think it’s the term “Spanish” or “Mexican/Argentinian/Cuban Spanish” that matters but the alleged purity and superiority of the “original” language of a particular country.
This remind me of an article by Alejo Carpentier where he studies the “decima” a traditional medieval Spanish (from Spain) poetic form that it’s been preserved in the several songs in the Caribbean tradition: so many forms of ’son’ cubano are more Spanish and traditional and today’s Spanish from Spain?
January 10, 2008 at 3:08 am
I’ve had British people tell me that I don’t speak English, I speak “American.” This is something I find highly amusing. I mean, American? What the hell is that? Considering that in the Americas there is Spanish, French, various kinds of Creole, Dutch, Portugese, and the various languages spoken by immigrants to the Americans like Chinese, Japanese, German, etc. So to say that we speak “American” stirkes me as a rather vague statement.
And H just told me that kids in his class say that the word football (what most people in the US refer to as soccer) was first, British and than modified as Latin.
January 10, 2008 at 7:41 am
Personally,I think them Spaniards speak Arabic.
January 10, 2008 at 5:16 pm
AH, por Deus Santísimo!!! e Nossa Senhora de Guadalupe!!!
mira que leo esto y no sé si reir o llorar, pero lo que de plano no me da la gana es hacer un ensayo sobre la propiedad de la lengua. El güero me decía el otro día que esto es un tema recurrente en Madrid: decirle a los mexicanos que habitan otra lengua… Podríamos agregar a todo esto que yo hablo guerrense y hay quienes hablan moreliense, duranguense (como el pasito duranguense), y así… es más, ahora hablo como la gente del sur de la ciudad y hay quienes hablan con el cantadito del centro o del norte del d.f., cactas?
como si las lenguas fueran una cajita prístina que se entregaran a uno solo para no compartir. BABEL es una leyenda de un libro viejo que no refiere al castigo divino por alcanzar el cielo sino que es también un reconocimiento a la pluralidad cultural de los pueblos, la convivencia que obliga a intentar pensar en el otro, y sabemos por los tiempos que corren que la intolerancia geo-política empieza por la distinción de las lenguas, los acentos, las demarcaciones e inflexiones de la misma…
en fin, You say tomato, I say tomatoe, you say…!!!
besos en mexicano chilango-bando
January 10, 2008 at 5:23 pm
English is a broad cover name for a “theme” (that is a Platonic ideal) and “variations” which are what actual people in various regions actually say. And in which they think. Same for Spanish.
January 10, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Justamente de esa cultura heredamos nosotros mexicanos la tozudez, la intolerancia… y nuestra tendencia a pensar que somos el pinche ombligo del mundo. La escena es tan molesta porque es como si tu propio padre no pudiera ver que heredaste sus ojos. (O su nariz :)
January 10, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Then how the hell was he able to understand everything you told him? I’ve gotten some snotty comments from Spaniards before but I just brush it off with a “¡No mames pinche güey!” Take that to your king!
January 10, 2008 at 7:09 pm
have experienced that with French as well. Some of my teachers in high school struggled with being Quebecois among the French teachers. there was always a snooty one in there letting them know just what real French was. (or letting us know)
January 10, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Wouldn’t ‘mexican’ include all the languages of Mexico? Many of which have nothing to do with Spanish, if my memory serves me correctly.
January 12, 2008 at 2:29 am
I had a similar experience here in the US. I had lunch with my friend Maddy and her then-boyfriend who was Galician, and a Columbian friend of Maddy’s. At the end of the lunch, during which we all spoke Spanish, he complimented the Columbian on her Spanish, told Maddy that she was okay but confused her masculine and feminine, and me – forget it. However, he’d been in the US for 2 years and didn’t speak a word of English.
I told this to my alternative medicine person, who is Nicaraguan, and she went off on a rant about how nobody invited the Spanish to come over and take our lands… She was smiling about it, but really. She thought the Spanish were lovely people, but very snobby.
Also I dated an Azorean who insisted that Brazilians don’t speak proper Portuguese.
January 14, 2008 at 4:34 am
I agree with John Bloomberg-Rissman. For modern linguists every single language is a variation of a LANGUAGE, which is just an “ideal.”
Así que en México hablamos la variedad mexicana del español, en EU se habla otra variación del español y en España hablan la variedad española del español. Y en ningún lugar se habla el mejor o el peor español.
Y me sorprende que haya aceptado qua hablan español porque por lo general dicen que ellos hablan castellano. Bueno, creo que los que marcan esa diferencia son los catalanes. Pero bueno, es igual.