Articles
A growing collection of articles on Latin American Spanish — its regional varieties, its words, and the cultures it carries.
Vos — The Pronoun Your Textbook Quietly Left Out
If you have studied Spanish from a textbook, you have learned about tú and vosotros. You have probably not been taught about vos — used by tens of millions of Latin Americans every day, with its own conjugations, its own history, and a story worth telling.
Che — The Word at the Heart of Argentine Spanish
Che runs through Argentine speech like a thread. It is not a noun, not a verb, not an adjective. It carries no grammatical weight. And yet it is the single word that most identifies an Argentine to other Spanish speakers — and one of them was named after it.
The Spanish of Mexico: Twelve Varieties, One Nation
If you meet a Mexican traveler in an airport in Buenos Aires, you will probably be able to tell they are Mexican within a sentence or two. But ask where they are from, and the answer will tell you a great deal. Mexican Spanish is not one Spanish — it is at least a dozen.
The Spanish Your Textbook Didn't Teach You
Open a popular Spanish textbook. What you read is a language — but not, quite, the language that is actually spoken by four hundred and eighty million people. It is a close cousin. It is a useful approximation. And almost no one tells you where the approximation ends.
