The Chilean language guantlet

One thing I have learned on the road through Chile is that they really don't speak Spanish.

They speak Chileno, which looks and sounds like it might be Spanish, only it's been dropped on the floor and kicked around a bit and left behind the couch until it's nigh incomprehensible. Chile is to Spanish like New Zealand is to English.

For starters, they speak really really fast. Not only that, a lot of them kind of speak into their lips, fudging the sounds. To make things even harder, they don't pronounce the ends of most words. For example, a simple sentence in regular Spanish like "Tu eres de que pais?" (which country are you from?), sounds like "Tu'ere de que pai", which to grommits like me, sounds like nonsense. Most of them also have no idea how to speak in a 'neutral' accent, so if you ask them to repeat, you just get the same gibberish, at the same speed.

To compound this, they chop in an unbelievable amount of slang:

  • Huevon (pronounced wey-on), which can be an endearing term to a friend, indicating another person, or calling someone a fuckwit depending on what tone you say it with. 
  • Po (like poh), which doesn't really mean anything...they just shove it in as a filler word, saying things like Hola po!
  • There is an unbelievable amount of ways to talk about sex, drinks, getting drunk, being drunk and being hungover. My favourite so far has been a phrase for being drunk: mas doblado que un Chino con visitas, meaning more bent over than a Chinese person with visitors. 
  • Another favourite has been mas peligroso que un Peruano haciendo una mapa: more dangerous than a Peruvian drawing a map, which refers to the long history of border disputes between Chile and Peru.
It is a far cry from the loud, expressive Argentinians. Visitors, prepare yourselves!

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