Pear! Pear!

Welcome to Andaluz

When I first got to Spain in 2007, I was utterly lost as far as the language goes. This surprised me, because I’d studied some Spanish in my life, chiefly in high school, with one Doctor Maxwell Mowry. Doctor Mowry was not a native Spanish speaker, but he did have a doctorate in the language, and he was a capable teacher. I learned a lot from him. I didn’t expect to understand everything when I got to Spain, but I definitely expected to understand more than I did, in fact, understand.

A big part of the problem was that in Doctor Mowry’s class I had studied Spanish, the language of Spain, but in 2007 I landed in Andalusia—a certain corner of Spain, where they speak a certain kind of Spanish. In Andalusia, Good morning sounds less like buenos días than “no día.” Para is “pa,” cada is “ca,” and nada is “na.” If your bar tab comes to six euros (seis euros), the bartender will say something like “SAY-ro,” which to the untrained ear sounds a lot like cero (zero).

This is a different sort of Spanish than the Spanish I learned in high school. This is Andalusian Spanish, or Andaluz, which is characterized in part by a kind of economizing, where consonants are clipped, syllables are swallowed, and words end up pruned down to their essence. The deeper you go into Andalusia, the deeper these cuts get. Depending on where you are, the word for “dude” can be chiquillo, quillo, illo, or simply llo (pronounced “yu”). That’s four different versions of the same word, all within an hour’s drive of each other.

If this sounds weird and/or funny to a non-native speaker, it is in fact a perfectly normal thing for languages to do. The point of language is to communicate. When people live together generation after generation, they find more direct ways to communicate with each other. Why bother with chiquillo if illo will do? We do the same thing in English: Think “bro” for brother, “sis” for sister, “cuz” for cousin. In much the same way that the Spanish a Dios te encomiendo (“I commend you to God”) eventually became adios, the English “God be with you” eventually became “good-bye”—or simply “bye.”

A lo mejor en el día lo hago.

So this is nothing unusual, this pruning and condensing of words that happens between locals over time. But of course it can get confusing in another language. I remember on my first trip to an Andalusian greengrocer, as I was leaving, the shopkeeper called out, Pera! Pera!, and I just assumed she was trying to interest me in a pear before I got too far away. After all, in Doctor Mowry’s class I had learned that pera means “pear.” I had not learned that in Andalusia, the word for “wait,” espera, can end up sounding a lot like pera. When the shopkeeper said, Pera! Pera!, she wasn’t trying to sell me a pear. She was telling me to wait because I had forgotten my change.

“Pera!” she called. “Pera!”

“No, gracias!” I called back over my shoulder, at which point the shopkeeper may well have concluded that the new kid in town was loaded.

But no. The new kid in town was not loaded. Pa na. The new kid in town was lost. Didn’t know a pear from an imperative.

I had a lot to learn.