Spanish in Spain: the th, the vosotros and why nobody says please
In the Spanish of Spain there is one sound and one pronoun that people in no other country use, and those two are most of what a learner notices. Cerca and plaza come out with a “th”. A group of friends is addressed as vosotros, with a verb form that exists nowhere across the Atlantic. Everything else is a matter of speed, vocabulary and manners.
The manners are the part people get wrong. People in Spain speak with a directness that sounds abrupt to anyone who learned their Spanish in Mexico or Colombia, and it is not rudeness. Below: where the “th” came from, the four ways of saying you, and why a bar order in Madrid has no please in it.
Hear the difference
One sentence, four countries. Spain first.
Where the “th” came from
English speakers call it the Castilian lisp, and the story that a king had a speech impediment everyone copied is a myth with no evidence behind it. What happened is ordinary sound change. Medieval Spanish had a crowded set of hissing sounds, six of them where modern Spanish has three, written with ç, z, s, ss, x and j. During the 1500s and 1600s that system collapsed, and it collapsed differently in different places.
Speakers in northern and central Spain pulled the two front ones apart, sending one to the back of the teeth as “th” and keeping the other as “s”. Speakers in Andalusia, in the south, merged them into a single sound instead. Seville was the port that all traffic with the Americas had to pass through, and the people who boarded the ships spoke Andalusian and Canary Island Spanish. That is why every Spanish speaker in the Americas, along with the Canary Islands and a good part of Andalusia, says cerca with an “s”. Neither result is a corruption of the other. They are two branches of the same split.
You lose nothing by choosing one. Casa and caza sound identical to most of the Spanish speaking world and no one struggles.
Four ways to say you
Spain is the one country on either side of the Atlantic where people kept a familiar plural in daily use. Latin America has three forms of address. Spain has four, and the extra one has its own verb ending in every tense.
tú tienes
you have, one person, familiar
People in Spain use tú far more readily than most Latin Americans. Shop assistants, waiters, a stranger asking directions and people twenty years older than you all get tú. To a Colombian this sounds startling.
vosotros tenéis
you have, several people, familiar
The form that exists only here. ¿Vosotros venís?, are you lot coming. Its endings are worth learning if you will spend time in Spain, because you will hear them constantly, and worth recognising even if you will not.
usted tiene
you have, one person, formal
Reserved in Spain for genuine distance: an official form, a much older stranger, a courtroom. If you use it with a shopkeeper, they can take it as sarcasm, or as a comment on their age.
ustedes tienen
you have, several people, formal
Rare in Spain outside announcements, the Canary Islands and western Andalusia, where people use ustedes for vosotros, as they do in the Americas.
Today happened in the perfect
People in Spain and Latin America divide the past differently, and the line falls at the end of the day. In Madrid, people use the perfect for anything inside the current day, week or month: hoy he comido tarde, I ate late today. Esta mañana he hablado con él, I spoke to him this morning. For yesterday, they go back to the simple past: ayer comí tarde.
In Mexico City and Buenos Aires people use the simple past for both. Neither side misunderstands the other, and a learner who picks one and stays with it will be fine. From this difference you can tell which side of the ocean a speaker is from, often before you can from any vocabulary.
Why nobody says please
A drink is ordered in Spain as ponme una caña, put me a beer, in the command form, with no please attached. In Mexico people would wrap the same request in a question, a diminutive and a conditional. In Spain people leave it bare, and among Spaniards that is friendly rather than curt. If you soften a request too much, it sounds like you are keeping the other person at a distance, or that you want something unusual from them.
It is the same in conversation. People talk over each other, they take interruption as interest, and disagreement is stated flatly and forgotten by the next round. Joder and coño turn up in ordinary sentences as punctuation, from people of every age. They are still crude words, and Spaniards watch who is in the room. And vale is the most used word in the country: fine, okay, got it, understood, and the sound Spaniards make while someone else is still talking.
Spain is not one accent
The careful, consonant by consonant Spanish that gets recorded for language courses belongs to Castile and the north. In Andalusia, home to more people than Paraguay, people drop final s into a breath and clip word endings, and their speech is far closer to Cuba or the Colombian coast than to Madrid. People in the Canary Islands sound Caribbean, with ustedes and no “th” at all. In Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country, people speak Spanish alongside another language, and you hear it in the melody and in which vowels get stretched. Galicians are known for answering a question with a question in Spanish.
What actually changes
The same everyday things, named four ways.
| English | Spain | Colombia | Mexico | Argentina |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| black coffee | café solo | tinto | café negro | café negro |
| a beer | caña | pola | chela | birra |
| work, job | curro | camello | chamba | laburo |
| bus | autobús | bus | camión | colectivo |
| car | coche | carro | carro | auto |
| phone | móvil | celular | celular | celular |
| computer | ordenador | computador | computadora | computadora |
| juice | zumo | jugo | jugo | jugo |
| avocado | aguacate | aguacate | aguacate | palta |
| strawberry | fresa | fresa | fresa | frutilla |
| popcorn | palomitas | crispetas | palomitas | pochoclo |
| pen | bolígrafo | esfero | pluma | birome |
| cool | guay | bacano | chido | copado |
| mate | tío | parcero | cuate | boludo |
Should you learn this one?
If Spain is where you are going, yes, and the “th” and the vosotros are worth the small effort they cost. If you are heading to Latin America, learn to understand Spain and say the words your own way. Spaniards are used to it. Spanish television, films and books reach every country, and nobody on either side has trouble following the other.
So which Spanish should you learn?
Learn one, understand the rest. The grammar is shared, the differences run to a few dozen everyday words and one extra pronoun, and after a month of listening you close most of the gap. You can hold a conversation when you find the word the moment you reach for it.
With Vozelu you do not have to pick one. Every practice sentence is read aloud by a native voice, and the four above are the ones in the app: Spain, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina.