Even your own language can have the capacity to surprise you. I recently joined a panel at a journalism conference with a reporter and a lawyer, both from Colombia. I found myself captivated by some of the words they used that aren’t – or rather weren’t – so common in Spain. The investigative journalist Diana Salinas referred to her craft as la filigrana, the filigree. I wouldn’t have used the term in that context, and yet it struck me as perfect to describe the intricate, careful work that investigative reporting requires.
Filigrana is not even considered a Latin-Americanism – it comes from Italian – but it has somehow been forgotten in everyday speech in Spain. As is often the case with Spanish in Latin America, usage and context enriches the word.
With some 600 million speakers around the world, Spanish has evolved over centuries and is now being pushed in new directions, especially in the US, where populations from different nationalities mix and interact with English speakers from a wide variety of backgrounds. “Spanish is the language that never ends,” said the Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez, the author of beautiful books in the language.
Of course, as with any subject where identity and history intersect, Spanish speakers do have their disagreements and debates about language. But nothing compares to the intensity with which some British people seem to react to the use of American English. Reading about the recent got/gotten controversy in the Guardian made me think Spanish speakers more readily embrace the good fortune of speaking a global language.
Across the varieties of Spanish, spelling remains largely uniform – but variations in vocabulary and usage can make mutual understanding tricky. Anyone addressing a multinational Hispanophone audience could struggle to find words that resonate in the same way across borders; in some cases a single term can mean very different things.
During the 2016 US presidential campaign, while I was working at Univision Noticias, a Spanish-language news outlet based in the US, we had a long debate over how to translate Donald Trump’s infamous sentence in the Access Hollywood tape. In the end, the lack of one word that would work for all Spanish speakers made us use the original English “pussy”.
Like other Spaniards working in US media, I tried – with little success – to neutralise my accent, which can sound harsh to some, and I avoided words that are less often heard outside Spain, such as coche for car, instead of carro or the more neutral auto.
That said, I don’t recall ever receiving complaints about my Spanish from colleagues or the audience. Nor have I seen letters to my current newsroom in Spain objecting to the use of words such as ameritar (deserve) or quilombo (mess), two of the many words common in the Americas that have entered our everyday speech. The most frequent complaint I encounter from Spanish speakers outside Spain is when we refer to the United States as América or to US citizens as americanos, as many in the English-speaking world so often do.
And yet discrimination and snobbery based on accent still exists in Spain, not only towards speakers of Latin American Spanish but also towards those from Spain’s southern regions, which are poorer and more rural than average. Younger generations’ attitudes have changed for the better and reject the notion that the only “good” Spanish is Castilian, as it is spoken in central Spain.
A long-term project by the University of Alcalá on Spanish language perceptions found that the most appreciated accents other than the speaker’s own were from Chile and the Caribbean. According to this study, speakers who rated their own accents lower than average were from certain regions of Spain, especially Madrid, the Canary Islands and Andalucía.
Thanks to the arrival of millions of people from the Americas in the past two decades, the Spanish spoken in Spain is more varied and expressive than ever, with a wider range of nuance. Readers in Spain are also fuelling a boom in literature, driven particularly by female Argentinian writers. Happily, sticking to one kind of Spanish is not an issue.
The Royal Spanish Academy, an institution founded in the 18th century that is responsible for producing the official Spanish dictionary, has adopted an increasingly global view of the language, though it still marks words less common in Spain as “Americanisms”. Its more inclusive geographic approach has not always translated to other considerations: most notably in debates over gendered or masculine words, an area in which the academy has been more conservative than the country at large.
Beyond these debates, one thing remains clear: language belongs to its speakers, no matter how hard academics and purists try to impose limits on it. Defending the uniqueness of a language or its links to a single territory often masks an underlying sense of superiority, a belief that one group’s way of speaking is somehow more legitimate or refined. That controlling instinct runs counter to the nature of language itself, especially in a world of cultural blending and global connection, where a short video from across an ocean could have more impact than an article in your local newspaper.
The richness that emerges from collective use, across continents and communities, is what keeps languages alive and thriving. That’s true for us, the fortunate speakers of Spanish and English. The many variations we share are not obstacles: they are a testament to the resilience, creativity and beauty of our languages.