Everyone speaks Spanish

"England and America are two countries separated by a common language" - George Bernard Shaw

Languages are a very funny thing. Start with a common language (say, Latin), spread its speakers over a large enough area, add a little bit of time, and watch how the original language starts to mutate in different places until it gets to a point where it becomes several different languages. That happened in Europe over the centuries and now we have not only Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese, but also Catalan, Asturian, Ladino, Romanian among many others.

It can be argued that something similar, to a lesser and / or slower degree, happens with Spanish in Latin America.

Richard Dawkins, the Biologist and evolutionary theorist, coined the term "meme" to describe a unit of cultural information. According to memetic theorists, memes propagate through populations the same way a gene propagates from one organism to another, and they are subject to the Darwinian rules of evolution (mutation and natural selection). Language, they argue, evolves like all memes; given enough time, some elements survive, some mutate, and some become extinct.

Let's take Spanish in Latin America. It became the de-facto official language when the Spaniards arrived and started subjugating the local populations. However, Spaniards arrived at different times in different places, where they found different languages, customs, traditions and foodstuffs.

During the conquista, a few things happened. On one hand, each indigenous settlement had its own cultural background, its own 'memes' if you will, and in true Darwinian fashion, some of those 'memes' survived the cultural annihilation brought by the Spaniards. In other cases, Spanish / Spaniard 'memes' had to be locally mutated in order to make them acceptable to the local population. And, obviously, many of the Spanish 'memes' were the fittest and survived through their own strength or through enforcement. However, all this is happening at a local level and at different times, so each settlement has a different starting point.

So, even at the very beginning, Spanish as a language didn't begin on a common ground throughout Latin America. It interacted with local customs and traditions, and began evolving in different ways in different places. Some forces work at keeping things from going awry: the Roman Catholic Church and Centralized governments helped during the conquista and the colonial life of Latin America, and today, global communications help in keeping the language on some common ground. However, as each different settlement evolved through the last 500 years, some startling differences have been appearing. To list them all would be impossible. Roxana Fitch keeps a fantastic repository of many of these differences in her website, Jergas de la habla Hispana (http://www.jergasdelahablahispana.org/). Just for example:

Caña, as defined in the dictionary is the name of the sugarcane. In Bolivia, it also means drinking binge. In Colombia, it means rum. In Costa Rica, it is also slang for money. In Cuba, it means money or muscle. In Spain, it could mean difficulty, boredom, liveliness (yes) or a glass of beer. And in Peru, it also means car.

Sometimes it can get more serious. Let's say you come from Mexico, where "cajeta" means "dulce de leche" and you go to Argentina, where "cajeta" refers to female anatomy!

And sometimes, it just makes communication impossible. I would like to see anyone who is not from Mexico make sense of Jaime Lopez' Chilanga Banda.

Ya chale chango chilango
Que chafa chamba te chutas
No checa andar de tacoche
Y chale con la charola.

So, we all call it Spanish, but it is not necessarily the same thing everywhere.

CB