A Definitive Guide to South American Spanish
Let’s operate under the assumption that we’re already in sync that when you travel somewhere, it’s good and appropriate and helpful and gratifying to have at least some of the basics of the local language down. To not be the foreigner barreling through a craft market crudely pointing at wares. To not assume that the world will bend to fit the comfort zone of an English speaker (even though it usually will).
That means that before you go on a trip, you buy a guidebook with key phrases, or you put yourself through a few weeks of introductory Duolingo, or you binge watch all your regular shows but with foreign-language subtitles slapped on underneath.
And it means, that if you did any of those things in Spanish and are thinking of going to South America—or if you went even further and studied Spanish in college or studied or worked abroad in Spain—you’re in for a bit of a rude awakening when you land in your chosen country and realize that Spanish is not a one-size-fits-all language.
I certainly was.
It’s a little crazy, right, to think that over 440 million people speak Spanish as their first language? That the Spanish empire colonized so much of the world that even now, centuries after its fall, Spanish is still the second most-spoken first language in the world, after Mandarin with 908 million? The vestiges of the English empire, all 378 million of us who speak English as our first language, come in at third.1
The Spanish of Spain is leagues away from the Spanish of Chile, which itself is leagues away from the Spanish of Argentina, which is a bit of a mean joke since they literally touch each other for over 5,000 kilometers. Though English has similar idiosyncrasies as it crosses borders and cultures: New Zealanders use different slang than Australians; Ireland’s English doesn’t sound quite the same as England’s English; and in America, we have such a wide range of dialects that I sometimes have a hard time understanding someone from just a few states away (here’s looking at you, Alabama).
But my Spanish, first learned in high school and then university with Spain-Spanish usage guidelines and professors (I wonder if most people learning English as a second language learn British English, even though they have way less speakers, as some residual version of colonialism, thinking that version of English is more pure than the American, and much more widely spoken, version?), then exercised for 3 months in Madrid during my stint as an au pair, then hibernated for six or so years, with a brief sojourn on a weeklong spring break trip in the Dominican Republic, and then trotted back out all around the South American continent, has now passed muster in eight of the 20 countries around the world with Spanish as an official language, six of them in South America (Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia). So I’ve gone through my fair share of Spanish language learning, and now I want to gather all I’ve learned in the hopes that it’s useful to someone else one day.
Let’s start with identifying vocabulary that’s only ever used in Spain. No one who’s not living in Andalusia (or one of the other 14 regions of Spain) will use these words and phrases. It’d be like showing up at a party in the States saying things like “Brilliant!” and “I’m knackered” and “Let’s have a cheeky glass of plonk—but stop me before I’m pissed, mate, I want to get my leg over that fit bird tonight!” We would have an idea of what you meant, more or less, but we’d immediately clock you as an outsider. Buy down some of that by not using any of the following in South America.
BUT WAIT FIRST A QUICK DISCLAIMER! I’m not a linguist, I only spent seven months in six countries of South America (the “Definitive” is a bit of a stretch; I didn’t make it to Bolivia or Paraguay for visa reasons, nor to Venezuela, for political unrest reasons), and my grasp of the Spanish language is functional, not flawless. Now you may continue, grain of salt in hand.
Spain-Spanish words and phrases that aren’t used in South America:
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- Coche (car). South Americans use auto (Chile, Argentina, Uruguay) or carro (Ecuador, Colombia) but never, never coche.
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- Aparcar (to park). Speaking of coches, in South America, you’ll hear estacionar (and the corresponding estacionamento, or parking lot / space) instead of aparcar.
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- Conducir (to drive). Let’s continue our driving theme: in South America, we use manejar. Which has always sounded suspiciously, to me, like the Southern Cone’s manjar, or dulce de leche.
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- Que guay!, que chulo! (how cool!). Each country has their own phrase to express this sentiment; I’ll address them below.
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- Vale (okay). This filler word is classic European Spanish and in South America, it’s dale. One letter and a continent of difference.
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- Telefono (cell phone). Use celular instead.
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- Boligrafo or the abbreviated boli (pen). Try pluma, which literally means feather (imagine those old-timey quills).
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- Gafas (eyeglasses). Go with lentes.
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- Calcetines (socks). South America uses medias. When I was first asked if I needed medias—while renting boots to go exploring around in the jungle—I thought he was asking me if I wanted half-size boots.
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- Patata (potato) gets shortened to papa.
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- Piso (literally means floor, but in Spain also means apartment—kind of like the British “flat”). In South America, you’ll only hear departamento.
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- Bistec (steak, as in a cut of beef) is just carne, or bife, or res.
- Chaqueta (jacket) becomes campera.
- El tiempo (the weather) is almost always referred to using el clima instead.
Words that are used in both Spain and South America but mean different things (each one something I found out the hard way):
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- Plata technically means silver, and in Spain, that’s how they use it. But in South America, it’s a slang word for money, and you’ll hear it much more often than you’ll hear dinero.
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- Caña in Spain is a draft beer; in South America, particularly in Ecuador and Colombia, it’s sugarcane, and, if ordered in a bar, a shot of overpowering sugarcane liquor. Not the refreshing ale you were hoping for.
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- Zumo in castellano is juice, whereas in South America you’ll only call a very concentrated fruit-flavored liquid (like lemon concentrate) zumo, and go with jugo the rest of the time.
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- Coger in Spain-Spanish is a common verb that means to take or grab. You could coger a taxi, or your backpack, or dinner. In South America, it’s a very vulgar euphemism for making love. So you REALLY don’t want to be using it to refer to inanimate objects. Unless you’re into that, I suppose.
- Joder in Spain is used for what coger is used for in South America; it can be translated like “fuck” in English, both as an action and a general exclamation / exploitative. But in South American Spanish, it just means to joke (like if you only used the f-word to mean “fucking around,” but with a less strong / stringent connotation) and is used way more often.
Now that you’ve got a rudimentary South American vocabulary, let’s cover a few of the big differences in grammar and pronunciation:
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- Tú vs. usted. Spain uses the informal second-person pronoun (tú) a great deal more than South America does. In Spain, I was pretty much never called usted, and only ever heard people being addressed with that formal second-person pronoun in extremely antiquated settings (like in politician’s swearing-in ceremony on television) or to pay respect to someone clearly much older (like meeting someone’s parents for the first time). In South America, it’s much more normal for many exchanges to start off using usted, and, in some cases to continue with that pronoun long past the initial period. (For instance, Diego refers to his mother as usted, a very respectful gesture, and not one you’d find in Spain.) This has been relatively difficult for me; I’m much more comfortable with the tú verb endings and will often either trip myself up trying to conjugate verbs to usted on the fly or offend the people I’m talking to by immediately referring to them as if I was talking to a close friend. I’m still learning the exact nuances of when to start with Como está? instead of estás. The other day, I was watching the Argentinian romantic comedy Corazón de León and caught an especially fascinating usage switch: the two main characters, busybody lawyer Ivana and especially diminutive entrepreneur León, first meet over the phone. They’re flirting and start using tú with each other. They meet the next day in person, and Ivana immediately starts referring to León as usted when she sees how short he is and wants to turn their date into something a lot less romantic. León notices and says something like, “Oh, can’t we tutear”—a verb that means refer to each other as tú—“like we were before, on the phone?” Basically, all this to say: refer to everyone who’s not your contemporary as usted first, especially in Ecuador / Peru / Colombia.
- But also vosotros vs. vos. Spain uses vosotros to mean something like “you guys” (an informal address to a group of people) and South America uses similar-sounding vos (an informal address to a single person), but only in some countries, and sometimes as a complete replacement of tú and sometimes as an additional option. And a Spaniard will never use vos and a Latino will never use vosotros. Sounds complicated? It is. The vosotros form is used in Spain when you want to say “you all”—i.e., address a group of people who you’d otherwise use tú with, if you were speaking to them one-on-one. I just spent a weekend with a Spanish woman and as we were hiking, she’d call back to my sister and me with, “Como estáis?” “How are you guys?” You will absolutely never hear any South American use vosotros like that. But if they are from Argentina or Uruguay, you will hear them use vos absolutely all the time. (And sometimes in Chile, too.) To me, it sounds kind of like when southerners in the States address a single person as “y’all,” since it’s informal and colloquial. And if you, like me, were educated with mostly Spain-Spanish and maybe some occasional generic Latin American Spanish thrown in, you won’t have learned the conjugations for vos. Your verb subject mental map will go yo, tú, él / ella / usted, nosotros, vosotros, ustedes. But slot vos in there right next to tú and remember its conjugation: either –és or –ás for regular verbs. So De dónde eres? becomes De dónde sos?; Me puedes ayudar? goes to Me podés ayudar? Technically, vos has its own commands, too, but I’ve found that only rarely will Latin American speakers use them, preferring instead to keep the tú command form but add a vos on the end for emphasis. Mira, vos!
- Lisps! Everyone has heard (from your cousin who just spent a semester in Spain to in Antonio Banderas interviews) the Iberian “lisp.” How “s” or “c” followed by a vowel sounds like condensed “eth” (as in the famous Barethlona). It’s technically called a “coronol fricative,” but that’s hard to say and harder to remember, so let’s just stick with lisp. Anyways, you won’t find that specific Spain-Spanish marker anywhere in South America, but you will find different country-specific pronunciations. So let’s get into them!
I’m going to go country-by-country in the order that I visited them, which is roughly counter-clockwise starting from the south, which is roughly the itinerary of a weather-chaser looking for sunshine in Patagonia and dry season in the Galapagos, which is also an itinerary that will start you in the hardest-to-understand South American dialect and finish in the easiest. Whoops.
CHILEAN SPANISH
Everyone, everyone, everyone agrees that Chilean Spanish is the hardest on the entire continent to learn. It’s a bit puzzling as to why—unlike Ecuador or Peru, with big indigenous populations that have brought unique vocabulary and pronunciation into those countries’ Spanish, Chile is relatively homogenous. It is isolated, though, encased between the open expanse of the Pacific, icy fjords and the Southern Ocean, the Andes mountains, and the Atacama desert, so maybe it makes sense that it’s developed its own unique dialect of Spanish.
Pronunciation difference:
- Chile, more than other South American countries, rarely pronounces the “d” sound when it’s followed by a vowel. So all of your participles—cansado, hablado, esuchado—lose that hard “d” and blend off into an “ow” sound: cansao, hablao, escuao. Es-coo-aa-oww. Something like that. It reminds me of a slick gangster negotiating in a dark alley. No time for consonants.
Vocabulary:
As I once wrote about, the list of everyday words that Chileans have their own name for is literally pages long.
But here are the most useful Chilean words:
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- Bacán (cool). Has a very low barrier for use. Literally anything can be bacán.
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- Weon (dude, bro, can also be used to mean jerk or asshole; depends on inflection and familiarity).
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- Cachai (ya know?). Constantly dropped into sentences by Chileans. Its inflection and repetition remind me of the questioning uptick of a surfer dude’s lilt. It’s literally translated in vos form—Chileans have their own conjugation for vos, using -ai instead of -ás, it’s honestly too one-off to even be worth going into—and is used mostly in informal conversations as a result.
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- Po (filler word, most closely related to something like “uh” or “well” in English). Added to sentences all the time, particularly short responses: sí, po is extremely common. Doesn’t really mean anything but gives a certain cadence, flow, and define Chilean-ness to a sentence.
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- Al tiro (right away)
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- Choclo (corn, instead of maíz) (same as Argentina and Uruguay)
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- Frutilla (strawberry, instead of fresa) (same as Argentina and Uruguay)
- Palta (avocado, instead of aguacate) (same as Argentina and Uruguay)
ARGENTINIAN SPANISH
Only slightly more easily understood than its Chilean neighbor, Argentinian Spanish plagues non-native speakers with three main differences from the rest of the continent: 1) the whole vos thing, covered above, which has basically replaced tú; 2) pronouncing the double-l as “sh” instead of “ya”; 3) a kind of airy intonation, particularly in Buenos Aires, that locales ascribe to their Italian predecessors. I love listening to Argentinian Spanish, but had trouble getting used to it at first.
Pronunciation difference:
- As mentioned above, the “ll” sound—one of Spanish’s extra letters, compared to our 26, and something that sounds like “ya” in most other Spanish dialects—becomes “sh” here. The regular “ya” sound / spelling becomes “sh,” too. Toallas become tow-ash-as; the playa is the plasha. A hella Argentine sentence begins: Yo me llamo…show me shaw-mow…
Vocabulary:
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- Bondi or colectivo (bus). Both names mean the same thing, but stem from different origins—bondi comes from tramways originally paid for with government bondes (bonds), and colectivo is a shortened version of vehículo de transporte colectivo (vehicle for collective transport). You’ll find colectivo all over South America, but most often in Buenos Aires.
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- Micro (long-distance bus). Contrary to what you’d guess—micro means small!—a micro is a coach or intra-city bus.
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- Gaseosa (soft drink). The rest of South America will use refresco, but not here.
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- Boliche (nightclub)
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- Telo (motel / love hotel where you can rent rooms by the hour)
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- Medialuna (croissant — but they’re much smaller / less flaky than their true French counterparts, so don’t get your hopes up)
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- Boludo (idiot, fool). Usually used in a friendly way (versus a grave insult) when you’ve done something stupid. But literally refers to a man’s balls, so not for use in nice company.
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- Re (very). A superlative that’s added to either adjectives or verbs to intensify them. I heard it most in Argentina, but you’ll find it in a few other places, too.
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- Che (general kind of “hey you” or “hey mate”)
- Manteca (butter). Used instead of mantequilla. But in other countries in South America, it can mean grease or lard, so only ask for manteca for your toast in Buenos Aires.
URUGUAYAN SPANISH
A small country on the edge of the continent, Uruguay gets most of its dialect from its only Spanish-speaking neighbor, Argentina. Here, too, they use vos all the time (though tú is used more than it is across the Rio Plata), they have the same “ll” / “y” pronunciation shift, and they share a lot of the same vocab.
Vocabulary:
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- Ta (okay, fine). A filler word like the Chilean po that’s constantly tacked on to sentences. Vamos al cine, ta?
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- Gaucho (cowboy). Used to refer to any man who works the pampas / roams around on a horse wearing leather. The word vaquero isn’t used.
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- Divina (divine, but means particularly nice or beautiful). This word is used all around South America, but I heard it most in Uruguay. It sounds lovely, if a bit exaggerative.
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- Matear (to drink mate with friends). Mate, an herbal drink brewed from yierba mate, is popular all around the Southern Cone, but here it’s so popular that Uruguayans joke they have a “third arm” to carry it around all the time. Uruguay’s the only country where mateando is a daily, public occurrence: you can’t go to the rambla or park or beach anywhere in the country and not see a group of friends with their thermos and goard cup and bombilla (straw). In Chile and Argentina, mate is usually drunk in the home and only rarely in public.
- Fainá (fried chickpeas). Often eaten, for some inexplicable reason, on top of perfectly good pizza.
PERUVIAN SPANISH
Full disclosure: I know plenty of travelers who fell in love with Peru, who learned their Spanish in Peru, who posted up for weeks in one of Peru’s cute little mountain towns, threw on an alpaca sweater, and fully assimilated into Peruvian life. I am not one of those travelers.
Honestly, aside from Lima, I didn’t see much of Peru, and what I did see, I didn’t like. I got really sick in Cusco and left the country shortly afterwards. Those other travelers were right, though; Peruvians speak relatively slowly, without too strong an accent, and it’s not a bad place to learn Spanish; I’ll go back one day and try to pick up more vocab.
Vocabulary:
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- Chévere (cool). Used to describe everything from someone’s Saturday night plans to a lake view. Reminds me of goat cheese every time I say it.
- Causa (friend). Also the name of a mashed potato dish, it’s used as a friendly, endearing term like mate.
ECUADORIAN SPANISH
Ecuador! You beautiful place absolutely obsessed with geographic location! Ecuador is the first place I heard locals refer to themselves first as being from the mountains, the coast, the big city, or the Galapagos, and then second as Ecuadorians. Perhaps influenced by the Ecuadorian tourism board’s very omnipresent marketing?
The Ecuadorian accent was by far the easiest for me to understand, and there’s no really noticeable pronunciation differences that will trip you up like you may have found in the Southern Cone.
Vocabulary:
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- Serrano/a (mountain person). A word in all dialects of Spanish, but in Ecuador, refers to those living at high elevation, like in Quito.
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- Mono/a (monkey / coastal person). Means something else in Colombia, so stay tuned, but here, it can either be a friendly or unfriendly way to describe someone from the northern coast of Ecuador.
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- Mande? (kind of like “what would you like me to do? Come again?”). I first heard this in the Galapagos from the indigenous woman who cleaned the bed and breakfast I worked in (more on that here); it’s very polite but also brings with it deeply ingrained class divisions. It personally makes me feel uncomfortable when it’s used on me by service professionals.
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- Chuta! (shoot!) The longer you hold the u, the more frustrated you are.
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- O sea (filler phrase). Literally, this would mean something like “that is,” but I heard it used a ton in Ecuador to give speakers a moment to think during conversation. Like we might say “hmm.”
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- Qué bestia! (how crazy / wild / cool!). Bestia literally means beast, but used here, or in the accompanying una bestia (which is also the name of Diego’s design company!), it is used to express enthusiasm, surprise, or incredulity.
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- Full (total). An word stolen from English, but pronounced with a Spanish accent (kind of like “fool”) and used to mean complete, total. Like full trabajo hoy (a lot to do today).
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- Chuchaqui (hangover or hungover). This versatile word, both a noun and an adjective—you can estar chuchaqui or tener chuchaqui—is only heard in Ecuador. I love how it sounds, but I distinctly do not love the actual sensation.
- Ñaño/a (brother or sister). Borrowed from Kichwa, an indigenous language, and can be used for friends, too (particularly between men).
COLOMBIAN SPANISH
Colombia, you freakishly beautiful place with little to no pronunciation difficulties—we love you! Though we do wish your coastal cities would slooooow down their speaking speed. Haggling has never been so hard as it was in Cartagena.
I spent almost all of my time in Colombia with a group of other English speakers, so my integration into local culture and slang wasn’t as complete as it was in, say, Chile or Ecuador, where I was working and interacting with locals every day, but I still picked up a decent amount of vocab.
Vocabulary:
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- Tinto (local coffee, though in Spain tinto is the house red wine, so be careful ordering on a morning stroll around Madrid). I only started drinking coffee a month and a half ago, when I was in Solento and it seemed like a mortal sin not to, so my coffee palate is relatively underdeveloped, but even I know that tinto tastes like garbage. It’s coffee made from the beans that aren’t good enough to export, and its burnt, bitter taste is usually masked by tons of milk and sugar. Stay away.
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- Chiva (party bus). An open-side, rickety, brightly-pained death-slash-party on wheels that will cart you around town and maybe kill you.
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- Rumba (party). Used more often than fiesta and usually referring to a party in a club or bar versus at home. The chiva will take you to the rumba!
- Chimba (cool, awesome). Can also be used, less commonly, to refer to a woman’s private parts.
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- Mono/a (blonde person—I got called mona almost every day in Colombia)
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- Dar papaya (give someone the opportunity to rob you, ask for trouble, expose yourself to risk). Said / seen a bunch around Medellín. A few areas there are labeled “papaya level 5”—maximum risk of pickpocketing. It struck me as a little strange, because in other South American countries, papaya can be another slang term for a woman’s private parts, but maybe that’s related to this euphemism?
- Qué pena! (sorry!, excuse me). This is said everywhere in South America, but especially in Colombia; I found Colombians (particularly in Medellín) to be really polite in public.
So there you go. Six countries, six vocab lists, six different dialects of the world’s second-most popular (and perhaps first most beautiful?) language. I have a lot of studying and practicing to do until I can fully hang with the Latinos in my life, and I’m excited to keep going. That Spanish girl that Marta and I went hiking with? She laughed when she heard me say dale and told me that I’d become total Latina. And I couldn’t be prouder.
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