Social networks, transatlantic academic exchanges, the success of Latin pop, paper house and Luis Miguel’s series, YouTube tutorials … The globalized world has managed that Spanish language speakers coexist more closely than ever, who become familiar with the nuances of each Spanish language. An Andalusian or a medium-connected Catalan knows today to differentiate the speech of a Colombian of a Venezuelan and in reverse probably go the same. In the midst of this rediscovery, a case draws attention: that of Spanish that is spoken in Chile, the most difficult to classify, the most recognizable by its melody, for its idioms and for what it has to disruptive. “Many linguists agree that the Spanish of Chile and Honduras are those who are varying faster in the Hispanic world,” says Ricardo Martínez, linguist and professor at the University of Chile. “I’ve been living outside my country for five years and I think about that daily, especially because my son asks me,” adds the novelist Santiaguino Alejandro Zambra.
What does it mean “What has disruptive Spanish of Chile”?
Are difficult criteria to measure with objective but easy to perceive data: the speed with which the oral and written language, the lexicon and also morphology and phonetics are changed, the way in which sociolinguistic codes fall and are replaced by other keys,
The increasingly lax relationship that speakers have with the norm … “There is no study that measures that. For now it is only an intuition, an impression that might not go badly aimed if you take into account that the speed of the
Linguistic changes are related to the types of social structuring, “explains Darío Rojas, professor at the University of Chile and member of the Chilean Academy of Language.
It is not clear to me that it is the worst.
It is more I doubt, I admit that it is eccentric, open, voluble, modern and even poetic (more in the sense of modernity to the Nicanor Parra).
Maybe it’s strange.
Although I feel honored to qualify it from disruptive.
And this because I think, “he reinvents, taking other languages, it’s porous, he’s young.
And what is fascinating the Chilean is that it allows you to create.
And two Nobeles, of course.
And he looks at all the poets, writers, chroniclers, singers, journalists.
He is almost suspicious.
The disruptive help create.
The Chilean language is free and, if the RAE matrix, let’s say, it does not work, because it is invented.
And not only at the oral level.
It is constantly renewed, even with each technological invention or pop phenomenon.
Sometimes it can be an overwhelming to live in Chile (in these early and anguishing days, where the jaws of what the poet Enrique Lihn tiled as “the horrid Chile”), but to speak in Chile always fascinates, we even have a word of its own To generate tangles in a conversation: El Cahuín, and a verb, Cahuinear, for gossip. Sometimes laughs. It is not casual that they say that it is a country of poets. All, in rigor, use the language as a way. Oral, in writing, and now digitally. More than a sum of dialects, it has social-etarian jars that do it very alive. Using the Chilean allows you to be free in a country that sometimes becomes authoritative. One of the most fascinating aspects of the young Gabriel Boric campaign is how he uses in language. Sometimes it stumbles when it gets nervous and speaks in a language more linked to Allende Chile (which is one and archaic, but no doubt key to understanding as it was talked about at that time), but it remixes it with the new inclusive language that has Acceeding an unexpected flight, so much that Arroba (@) is the new lyrics of the language. But where Boric flies and he can be considered as someone he has read, he writes and listens. And he is not afraid to use a tender, non-binary, ultra masculine language or alpha. If he loses this return, it is because he refuses to use a violent language and the favorite word of him is affection.
In Chile, in an almost hysterical way, new words are incorporated and are revived with other meanings archaic words (“ñoño” is now something like Geek Cool, but it also knows that it is a half NERD “bolt).
Here the language has some American clothes used: it is recycled, the use is changed, used to give it a new color.
Perhaps Chilean is not as accurate to communicate, but she is gloriously open to receiving influences and to specify the world to which you belong.
When I arrived in Chile, without knowing Spanish but willing to learn it to survive, I realized that everything is My Fair Lady and who told them the Englishmen from Latin America, not for having been an empire or for the neat or orderly, but by being classist
, by the degree of repression and the panic of the elites to the new.
They taught me that the accent was all because “this can you know who you are” and pronounce, even drunk, the CH, that strange letter that does not exist in English and that is with that part the name of the country, was key.
Pronounce the CH as SH was the greatest of sins.
Today, it is used in quotation marks.
It does not matter so much, but the language is still used as a sign of identity, crazy.
I remember, suddenly, of the yellow dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms, the Spanish binary binary.
Here they told me: Spanish is written as it sounds, the only complicated are the tildes.
It may be, but what happened when they omitted words or picked up pedestrian words, to say other things, to insult, to sanitize what they were hiding.
Here, in the 70 and 80, to survive, to overcome, to overcome everything, it had to be read well, attentive, alert.
You had to read different, between lines, understand the thousands of hidden and encrypted meanings.
In this world, one thought one thing and said another.
Or, there was so much that you could talk in private, but you could not write from certain things.
Each tribe was a language.
Few read, but everyone believed characters and all swore that they had something to tell, when the really interesting thing was all they hid.
The Chilean tongue robs: used the Frenchman and continues to use, without fear, English, but once the cable arrived (that first technology) began using other countries that use Spanish.
Televisa filled with Mexicanisms the language, and little by little Chile exceeded its Argentine envy using PortEño TICS (boy, girl).
From Peru, Bacán and Spain was stolen, thanks to Anagrama and Almodóvar, used the fuck to increase a broad genital vocabulary.
I like Chilean because it allows me to write free: if a new word or a different way of writing or writing is sold (the K instead of the q, use the numbers to abbreviate, for example), is adopted.
The language, that fragmented language that at a time unites us, moves faster than society.
There are secret theories that compare it to the Australian and his tie with English, that is, at first he is the same language but he has mutated so much that he became another.
Both countries were, for a long time, isolated sites.
The Chilean language or Spanish of here is characterized by not having regional accents.
This caused me a funny phone box with my editor, Felipe wins that I think I won.
I feel that, although there are mild and imperceptible accents, to be such a long country, the truth is that it is said equally everywhere: same tone and same words, starting through the new words that sprout from the network.
Here it is key not to say everything directly and that is why the slang are used, but the amount of fashionable words that can be canonized forever (“cantinflear” comes from pop, Mexican cinema of 40 and 50, from
That star that was cantinflas; It is something that everyone uses, now, more as an attack, even though nobody reminds cantinflas, but, still, it means that it means at least two things: to speak a lot and not say anything and, besides
, Changing quickly from mind so that it gets to laugh).
There is no variety of accents regions of tomo and loin as there are in Mexico, Argentina, Colombia. Even Ecuador. The differences in language had more to do with social class. But here comes the curious element: they are the elites that they speak. Maybe they have a particular accent (of course, the CH emphasize it, but they boast of not talking well because to speak well (pronounce well, use the right words, not using so many reiterative tics or vocative) is considered aspirational . That is the great disruption. While elites everywhere allegedly use the language, in Chile there is that fear of the si-practical (other Chileanism), which is very difficult to summarize, but that in a few words it is an atavistic fear of the incestuous elite of this country -Paster to speak well. Therefore, the one who has to speak well or use the right words can be wrong. The worse is spoken, the better strain is. The tie of old chile with the countryside, the latifundios, made the rich talk as pawns and the middle class I would like to speak well to show that they were educated, which caused the mockery of the powerful who held their poor, basic language and with a A certain contempt to pronounce well the last syllable.
And taking the CH of discourse, the other idiomic obsession is to talk in italics or lengthen or join words.
A word pronounced in another way becomes ironic or perhaps an insult.
Insults, like huevon, become part of the forms.
A country that is already referred to every so much needs an elastic language.
Sometimes I think that classical Spanish and the RAE is not enough for Chile.
Need more.
And for that reason, little by little, now words of Japanese (otaku culiado) or of the Korean and that new universal language is digital (eye with Mesmes Made in Chile).
Chilean is fast, despised certain letters of the end, it looks like a song, but more than that, more than the accent, the power is in that it allows so many to have used so differently and none stopped being Chilean.
There are Violeta Parra, Huidobro, Gómez Morel, José Donoso and Jorge Edwards, Diamela Eltit and Alejandro Zambra.
No, it is not water what makes Chile creative.
It is their internal hatred, it is their classism, it is a desire to be modern, it is their eagerness to appropriate.
Of all the countries in which Castilian is spoken, something tells me that I was lucky enough to reach the one who, although few believe it, speaking the language is more inclusive, freak, fast, intense, creative, rogue and sonorous.
Some examples: “For me, the great novelty is that those born of mid-70s have begun to use the colloquial spectrum within the formal spectrum. It is given in the policy, it is given in academic life … Eye,
It is the population formed, the one that passes through the university, which has taken the colloquiality to formality, “says Soledad Fajardo Chávez, professor at the University of Chile, a member of the Chilean Academy of Language.
“There is a lot of informality in the current language.”
“A very interesting concrete example is the modification of pronunciation,” adds Ricardo Martínez.
“There are traits as the way to pronounce the CH, which was very stratified by social groups. The speech of prestige pronounced Chile; The speech of the low classes said Shile. That difference has been flattened because social groups have begun to interact much more
What they did before, especially in higher education, there is no longer as much isolation and, therefore, speech is more homogeneous, regardless of radicalized groups in their search for identity. Chilean Spanish was divided by strata
Social more than by territories; It was very easy to identify what kind another person came for his speech. Now it is not so much. ”
And what about morphology?
The use of the suffix -e as a brand of the neutral genre became known to the Hispanic world in the protests of Santiago de Chile of 2019. That year, the posters, the speeches and the painted appeals to the Chileans, the Chilean and Les Chilenes.
Today, Martínez and Fajardo agree that its use is perfectly normalized in the classroom.
“I give class at the University of Chile, which is public, and in the Diego Portales, which is a private more or less assimilated to the public. In the two is very present that -e. If I start a class in zoom, greeting
‘Hello everyone, all and you are all’. And the students, the students and the students respond the same, “explains Martínez.
Darío Rojas nuances that idea: “The -e is a form of reputable political action against the dominant ideology and patriarchy. If normalized, it would stop being disruptive. I do not think what activists wish to achieve a hegemony for LE –
and”.
In his email, Rojas systematically and consciously employs the female genre (“anthropologists”, “young people”, “activists”) as the form that encompasses men, women and non-binary people.
In the end, the three examples seem to pray about the same idea: the acceleration of Spanish Spanish is the reflection of the social cracks of a country that was considered a case of economic, political and social success but who hid imbalances, grievances and
Chronic disconents
How not to relate the changes in Chile’s language with the 2019 protests?
Some previous data: Chilean Spanish was always different, from the time of the colony.
“In the sixteenth century, when the Koinization of the language began, the Standardizing Process of Spanish, the Printing, Universities and Many Spaniards came to America and brought the center-northern language variety in Spain, which has been
Always the prestigious, unlike the Predominant Andalusia’s speech in the conquest. But they arrived in the areas of vicerinate: to Mexico, Peru, Colombia and, later, to the area of La Plata. To Chile not because Chile was just a captaincy
, a zone remote and isolated by the mountain range and the desert, “explains Chávez.
“In dialectology, there is always a map of the Spanish Spanish that differentiates the Andean area, the Guaranítica, La Mesoamericana, the Rioplatense … and that of Chile, as a lone country.”
Does that mean that Chilean Spanish looks more like Andalusian Spanish 500 years ago than other American language variants, just as Hispano-Jew refers to the Castilian of the year 1492?
“That is the old posture. Let’s say, better, that the base of Chile’s Spanish has many elements of Andalusian Spanish united to many other subsequent innovations,” says Chávez.
Other particularities: In Chile, resistance to the Anglicisms that has been given in other Latin American countries was never given, according to Ricardo Martínez, who speaks of the “Anglochylenisms” of the port cities.
And, of course, there is the influence of indigenous languages of the area and the other languages of European immigration: German, Croatian, Italian …
But neither geographical isolation nor the historic nor contact with the Mapuche language explain the change that the Spanish of Chile lives.
“Chile is a society strongly marked by class conflicts, and that manifests itself in the linguistic identity and in the linguistic ideologies of Spanish Spanish speakers,” explains Darío Rojas.
His theory is that everything that has happened in Chile these years with the language begins to occur in the other Spanish-speaking countries in which social classes condition coexistence.
And that makes the Chilean case even more interesting.
Let’s talk about Spain for a second.
Has anyone set out that Spaniards from the college middle class like C. Tangana or Íñigo Errejón make his and stetize the old speech of the urban working class, that in Madrid was called Cheli?
In that this use has a political and identity nuance, which is a way of symbolizing a form of nonconformism …?
Does that use of language sound familiar to Chileans?
“In recent years we are seeing very ideologized speech varieties, what you call Cheli here is called FLITE. And there are many groups of people in college who do not belong by origin to that culture but who are validating their language. I think the
Regueer and the Trap also influence that phenomenon and that is why I think the same thing is happening in other Latin American countries, “explains Ricardo Martínez.
“Actually, changes in political discourse began on the right,” continues Soledad Fajardo.
“The new right that was consolidated when Democracy arrived had young leaders, high-class political politicians who adopted a colloquial language to generate closeness.”
In those years of optimism, that Spanish Chilean Spanish was a gesture of liberal optimism.
Then, when the disenchantment came, he became the opposite.
“It is the essence of any protest, also that of the social outbreak of 2019. The protest always means communicative immediacy: it is necessary to communicate short, with anger, to communicate equalize instead of distinguishing … In 2019 something else happened: Surprise
Chile. The speakers usually have a negative vision of their speech, they think they speak badly, even though at the academy we try to persuade that it is not like that. Not only happens in Chile, “says Fajardo.
“In 2019 there was a change: words that passed by incorrect and not exemplary entered into public discussion.”
So, is there space for normative language in Chile?
“Despite everything, despite the vertigo of social, ideological, valoric transformations, and the identity of people, Chile remains a very institutionalized country, very directed from law. Justice, traditional media and government, maintain the
Standard call cultured. It is not the same as it happens in college, “says González.
We only have to talk about literature. So, from memory: Jorge Edwards books and José Donoso did not sound very Chileans, right? “No, but because the boom adopted an almost neutral language, a Latin American without brand. Sources and Vargas Llosa used that same language. García Márquez was the exception,” explains Ricardo Martínez. 50 years later, non-Chilean readers of sweat, from Alberto Fuguet, had to arm himself with patience to learn dozens of santiaguino slang forms. “Sometimes it can be an overwhelming to live in Chile (these early and anguishing days, where the jaws of what the poet Enrique Lihn tiled as” the horrid Chile “), but speak in Chile always fascinates, we even have a word Own to generate tangles in a conversation: El Cahuín, and a verb, Cahuinear, for gossip. Sometimes it gives laughter. It is not casual that they say it is a country of poets. All, in rigor, use the language as a way. Oral, in writing, and now in a digital way. More than a sum of dialects, Chile has social-etarian jars that do it very alive. Using the Chilean allows you to be free in a country that sometimes becomes authoritative “, Fuguet responds in written lines to explain to the world his vision of hyperchilean.
