Sevillano versus Boricua dialect, by Bella Ramírez

  

 I have been around the Spanish language for as long as I can remember. Though I would not technically classify myself as fluent, I do speak Spanish well and understand it even better. As both of my parents and all of my family as I know are from Puerto Rico, all I have known in Puerto Rican Spanish. I was lucky enough to find an amazing group of friends that all live in Puerto Rico, so even more so I find myself surrounded by the dialect.
Given my advanced understanding of Spanish, I believed I would be prepared to fully immerse myself into the culture with ease. Yet, to my surprise I was taken aback at the numerous differences between the dialect here in Sevilla and the Puerto Rican dialect I am used to.

“Que tal”, “Tio/Tia”, “zumo”, “mechero”, all of these being different words for things I know, but did not understand fully in Spanish given their specific words for it. For example, when ordering juice here, I was first caught very off guard when I ordered orange juice and said, “jugo de naranja”. Firstly, in Puerto Rico we call oranges, “china”, but I knew they didn’t, but even when I said “jugo”, the person taking my order had a confused face as if she didn’t understand what I was saying.

After hearing the difference in wording for little things, I thought about class and the reference to the Sapir Whorf theory and the snow reference. To us, that is orange juice yet, the ways in which we reference it are different and can be mistaken for other things or just completely misunderstood.

As I continue to understand the dialect specific to Sevilla, I understand more the ways in which communication as we have spoken about in class is an extremely important part of Spanish culture. This example is a great way of digesting the dialect and acknowledging that slang and dialect are a huge part of the Spanish culture, and more specifically the idea of not finishing words and speaking a “broken” Spanish in the south is normalized. Their ways of speaking is a crucial part of their cultural development and cognitively how language shapes the Spanish perception.

  

Website: https://www.speakeasybcn.com/en/blog/the-differences-between-spanish-in-spain-and-latin-america

 

(picture of my Puerto Rican friends and I in Sevilla!)