Chilean Spanish: the language's great pressure cooker

• The Spanish of Venezuela The lyrical barracks of Chavismo

• Puerto Rico The 'Spanglish' Island

• 'El miamiense' The feared neutral Spanish

• Elections in Chile Polarization and Uncertainty

• Constituent Assembly The re-foundation of Chile

Social networks, transatlantic academic exchanges, the success of Latin pop,

and Luis Miguel's series, YouTube tutorials ... The globalized world has made Spanish speakers coexist more closely than ever, that they become familiar with the nuances of each Spanish language. Today, a moderately connected Andalusian or Catalan knows how to differentiate the speech of a Colombian from that of a Venezuelan, and the reverse is probably the same. In the midst of this rediscovery, a case draws attention: that of the Spanish that is spoken in Chile,

. "Many linguists agree that the Spanish of Chile and that of Honduras are the ones that are changing the fastest 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 it every day, especially because my son asks me," adds the Santiago novelist Alejandro Zambra.

What does "what is disruptive about Chilean Spanish" mean?

They are criteria that are difficult to measure with objective data but easy to perceive:

, 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 could not go wrong if one takes 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.

Some ideas / notes about the Chilean language

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ALBERTO FUGUET

It is not clear to me that it is the worst.

Moreover, I doubt it, I admit that it is eccentric, open, fickle, modern and even poetic (more in the sense of modernity a la Nicanor Parra).

Maybe it's strange.

Although I am honored to be called disruptive.

And this because - it occurs to me - it reinvents itself, it takes on other languages, it is porous, it is young.

And what is fascinating about the Chilean is that it allows you to create.

And two nobels, of course.

It is almost suspicious.

The disruptive help create.

The Chilean language is free and, if the headquarters of the RAE, let's say, is useless, then it is invented.

And not only at the oral level.

It is constantly renewed, even with every technological invention or pop phenomenon.

Sometimes

(in these uncertain and anguished days, where the jaws of what the poet Enrique Lihn called "the horrible Chile" appear), but speaking in Chile is always fascinating, we even have a word of our own to generate entanglements in a conversation: the

, and a verb,

, for gossip. Sometimes it's funny. It is not by chance that they say that it is a country of poets. Everyone, strictly speaking, uses language in their own way. Oral, in writing, and now digitally. More than a sum of dialects, it

.

Using Chilean allows you to be free in a country that, at times, becomes authoritarian.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the young Gabriel Boric's campaign is how he uses language.

Sometimes he stumbles when he gets nervous and speaks

, but he

with the new inclusive language that here has taken an unexpected flight, so much so that the at sign (@) is the new letter of the language.

But where Boric flies and can be considered as someone who has read, writes and listens.

And he's not afraid to use cute, non-binary, ultra-masculine, or alpha language.

If he loses this round, it is because he refuses to use violent language and his favorite word is sweetie.

In Chile, in an almost hysterical way, new words are incorporated and archaic words are revived with other meanings (

). Here the language has some used American clothing: it is recycled, its use is changed, it is used to give it a new color.

Perhaps the Chilean is not so precise to communicate, but he is

. When I arrived in Chile, without knowing Spanish but willing to learn it to survive, I realized that everything is

and that the English of Latin America called them, not because it was an empire or because of the neatness or orderliness, but

. They taught me that the accent was everything because "so you can know who you are" and pronouncing, even drunk, the ch, that strange letter that does not exist in English and that is what the name of the country starts with, was key.

.

It doesn't matter that much anymore, but language is still used as a sign of identity, crazy.

I suddenly remember the very yellow dictionary of synonyms and antonyms, the Spanish binary bible.

.

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 70s and 80s, to survive, to win, to overcome everything, you had to read well, attentively, and alert. You had to read differently, between the lines, understand the thousands of hidden and encrypted meanings. In this world,

. Or, there was so much that you could talk in private, but you couldn't write about certain things. Each tribe was a language. Few read, but they all believed themselves to be characters and they all swore they had something to tell, when what was really interesting was everything they were hiding.

The Chilean language steals: he used French and continues to use English without fear, but once the cable arrived (that first technology) he

. Televisa filled the language with Mexicanisms, and little by little Chile overcame its Argentine envy using Buenos Aires tics (boy, girl). From Peru he stole the bacán

I like Chilean because it allows me to write freely: if a new word or a different way of writing or writing is sold well (the k instead of the q, use the numbers for short, for example), it is adopted. Language, that fragmented language that at the same time unites us, moves faster than society. There are

. Both countries were, for a long time, isolated sites.

The Chilean language or the Spanish here are characterized by not having regional accents. This caused me a funny telephone dispute with my editor, Felipe Gana, which I think I won. I feel that, although there are slight and imperceptible accents, for such a long country, the truth is that it is spoken the same everywhere: same tone and same words, starting with the new words that sprout from the network. Here it is key not to say everything directly and that is why slang is used, but

("cantinflear" comes from pop, from the Mexican cinema of the 40s and 50s, from that star who was Cantinflas; it is something that everyone uses, now, more as an attack, even though no one remembers Cantinflas, but still, it is understood that it means at least two things: to talk a lot and not say anything and, in addition, to change your mind quickly in a way that comes to laugh).

There is no variety of accents regions of tome and lomo as there are in Mexico, Argentina, Colombia. Even Ecuador. The differences in language had more to do with social class. But here the curious element comes in: it

. They may have a particular accent (of course, the ch is emphasized with a luck of hidden t), but they boast of not speaking well because speaking well (pronouncing well, using the correct words, not using so many tics or repetitive vocatives) is considered aspirational . That is the great disruption. Although elites everywhere supposedly use the language better,

(Another Chileanism), which is very difficult to summarize, but which in a few words is an atavistic fear of the incestuous elite of this country-corridor to speak well. Therefore,

. The worse you talk, the better you are. The bond of old Chile with the countryside, the latifundios,

, which provoked the ridicule of the powerful who flaunted their poor, basic language and with a a certain contempt for pronouncing the last syllable correctly.

And taking the ch out of speech, the other idiomatic obsession is speaking in italics or lengthening or putting words together.

A word pronounced in another way becomes ironic or perhaps an insult.

.

A country that is re-founded from time to time needs an elastic language.

Sometimes I think that classical Spanish and

.

And that is why, little by little, words from Japanese (culiado otaku) or Korean and from that new universal language that is digital are now creeping in (watch out for

).

The Chilean is fast, he despises certain lyrics at the end, it

.

Violeta Parra, Huidobro, Gómez Morel, José Donoso and Jorge Edwards, Diamela Eltit and Alejandro Zambra are there.

No,

.

It is

, it is their classism, it is a desire to be modern, it is their desire to appropriate.

Of all the countries where Spanish is spoken, something tells me that I was lucky enough to reach the one that, although few believe it, speaking the language is more inclusive,

, fast, intense, creative, mischievous and sonorous.

Some examples: "For me, the great news is that those born in the mid-70s onwards have begun to use

. It occurs in politics, it occurs in academic life ... Be careful, it is the educated population, the one that goes through the university, which has brought colloquiality to formality, "says Soledad Chávez Fajardo, a professor at the University of Chile, and a full member of the Chilean Academy of Language. "There is a lot of informality in today's language."

"A very interesting concrete example is the modification of pronunciation", adds Ricardo Martínez. "There are features such as the way of pronouncing the ch, which

. The speech of prestige pronounced Chile; the speech of the lower classes said

. That difference has flattened because social groups have begun to interact much more than they did before, especially in higher education. There is no longer so much isolation and, therefore, the speech is more homogeneous, regardless of the fact that there are radicalized groups in their search for identity.

; it was very easy to identify what class another person came from by their speech. Now it is not so much ".

And what about morphology? Using the -e suffix as a

mark of the neuter was unveiled to the Hispanic world in protests in Santiago de Chile in 2019. That year, posters, speeches and painted appealed to Chileans, Chilean and

. Today, Martínez and Fajardo agree that its use is perfectly standardized in the classrooms. "I teach at the University of Chile, which is public, and at Diego Portales, which is a private one more or less assimilated to the public.

. If I start a class in Zoom, I say hello 'Hello everyone, each and

'. and the students, the students and

respond equally ,

"Martinez said.

Darío Rojas qualifies this idea: "The -e is a form of oppositional political action against the dominant ideology and patriarchy.

. I do not think that what the activists want is to achieve hegemony for the - and". In his post, Rojas systematically and consciously uses the feminine gender ("the anthropologists", "the young women", "the activists") as

.

In the end, the three examples seem to revolve around the same idea: the acceleration of Chilean Spanish is a reflection of the social cracks in a country that was considered a case of economic, political and social success but that

. How not to link the changes in the language of Chile with the protests of 2019?

Some previous data: Chilean Spanish was always different, since colonial times. "In the 16th century, when the

of the language began, the standardizing process of Spanish, the printing press, the universities and many Spaniards came to America who came from the court and brought the central-northern variety of the language in Spain, which has been always the prestigious one, unlike the speech of Andalusia predominant in the conquest. But they

because Chile was only a captaincy, a remote and isolated area by the mountain range and the desert, "explains Chávez Fajardo." In dialectology, a map of the Spanish of America is always placed that differentiates the Andean, the Guaranitic, the Mesoamerican, the Rio de la Plata ... And

".

Does that mean that Chilean Spanish is more similar to Andalusian Spanish from 500 years ago than other American variants of the language, just as Hispano-Jewish refers to Castilian Spanish from 1492? "That is the old position. Let's say, better, that the base of Chilean Spanish has many elements of Andalusian Spanish linked to many other later innovations," explains Chávez Fajardo. Other peculiarities: in Chile there was never the resistance to Anglicisms that has occurred in other Latin American countries, according to Ricardo Martínez, who speaks of the "Anglo-Chileanisms" of port cities. And, of course, there is the influence of the indigenous languages ​​of the area and of the other languages ​​of European immigration: German, Croatian, Italian ...

But neither geographic nor historical isolation nor contact with the Mapuche language explain the change that Chilean Spanish is experiencing. "

, and this is manifested in the linguistic identity and in the linguistic ideologies of the Chilean Castilian speakers", explains Darío Rojas. His theory is that everything that has happened in Chile these years with the language begins to happen 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 noticed that Spaniards from the university middle class like C. Tangana or Íñigo Errejón

? How does this use have a political and identity nuance, which is a way of symbolizing a form of nonconformity ...? Does this use of language sound familiar to Chileans?

"In recent years we are seeing very ideological varieties of speech. What you call cheli here is called flaite. And there are many groups of people in the university who do not belong to that culture by origin but who are validating their language.

and that is why I think the same is happening in other Latin American countries, "explains Ricardo Martínez.

"In reality, the changes in the political discourse began on the right," continues Chávez Fajardo. "

." In those optimistic years, that informal Chilean Spanish was a gesture of liberal optimism. Then, when the disenchantment came, the opposite became the case.

"It is the essence of any protest, also that of the social outbreak of 2019. Protest always means communicative immediacy: you

... In 2019 something else happened:

. Speakers tend to have a negative view of their speech, they think they speak badly, no matter how hard we try to persuade them at the Academy that this is not the case. It does not only happen in Chile, "says Fajardo. "In 2019 there was a change:

."

So, is there room for normative language in Chile? "In spite of everything, despite the vertigo of social, ideological and value transformations, and the identity of the people

. Justice, the traditional media and the Government, maintain the norm called cultured. It is not the same that happens in the university ", concludes González.

We can only talk about literature. So, from memory:

books

"No, but because the Boom adopted an almost neutral language, a Latin American without a brand. Fuentes and Vargas Llosa used that same language. García Márquez was the exception," explains Ricardo Martínez. 50 years later, non-Chilean readers of

, by Alberto Fuguet, had to arm themselves with patience to learn dozens of forms of Santiago slang. "Sometimes it can be a burden to live in Chile (in these uncertain and anguished days, where the jaws of what the poet Enrique Lihn called" the horrible Chile "appear), but speaking in Chile is always fascinating, we even have a word own to generate tangles in a conversation:the

, and a verb,

, for gossip.

Sometimes it's funny.

It is not by chance that they say that it is a country of poets.

Everyone, strictly speaking, uses language in their own way.

Oral, in writing, and now digitally.

.

Using Chilean allows you to be free in a country that, at times, becomes authoritarian, "Fuguet replied in a few lines written to explain to EL MUNDO his vision of

.

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