Useful Notes / Spanish Language

"El idioma — el castellano, el español — llega a ser para nosotros como un licor que paladeamos, y del cual no podemos ya prescindir. [...] Ya somos, con tanto beber de este licor, beodos del idioma."^translation "Our language — Castilian, Spanish — has come to be, for us, a kind of liquor that we savor, and which we no longer can do without. [...] We are now, having consumed so much of this liquor, drunkards of the language."

— Spanish poet Azorín^note Pen name of José Martínez Ruiz, 1873-1967

Spanish, also known as "Castilian"^note This is the actual original name of the language. The country we know today as Spain was formed in the late 15th century, when Castile and Aragon, the two main Christian kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula, finished the Reconquista and expelled the Muslims that had occupied it for 800 years. Both kingdoms were united thanks to the marriage of their respective monarchs, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. Castilian was, obviously enough, the language from Castile, which eventually became the dominant language of the territory, and the one that came to be predominant in their American territories. "Castilian Spanish", or just "Castilian", are very common terms to refer to the Spanish language as it's spoken in Spain, specifically, is an Ibero-Romance language, and the second most natively spoken language in the entire world (after Mandarin Chinese) due to the enormous expanse of the Spanish Empire in its heyday. It's the official language of 20 countries^note along with Puerto Rico which is an unincorporated territory of the USA, as well as one of the six official languages of the United Nations and an official language of 13 other international organizations. The United States also has a sizable population of Spanish-speakers numbering around 50 million, which is more than the entire population of most Spanish-speaking countries, Spain itself included.^note And if you look below, there's even a native dialect of Spanish in New Mexico and Colorado. In short, this is a big language. It's the most widely spoken language in the Western Hemisphere.

Naturally, with all these people speaking it, considerable differences can arise between the various dialects; more on that later.

Also see:

• Spanish Accents And Dialects
• Spanish Literature
  • Latin American Literature (aside from Brazilian Portuguese literature)
• Spanish Naming Conventions

An exceedingly brief history

The modern Spanish language is a Romance language, one of the large family of languages descending from the Vulgar Latin spoken by the common people of much of the late Roman Empire. The Romance languages of Iberia—including Spanish, but also Portuguese, Catalan, and regional languages like Galician and Asturian—are interesting because they descend from a peculiarly conservative dialect of Vulgar Latin. Hispania was one of the first regions the Romans conquered outside what is now Italy, having first invaded it during the Punic Wars at the Republican era, even if they only fully assimilated it about two centuries later. Native Celtic and Iberian languages eventually died off and were replaced by Latin, with Vascon language (now known as Basque) being a notable exception.

Spanish Latin preserved a lot of Republican-era Classical Latin vocabulary that would be superseded in Rome in later periods, and some evidence of this remains even in modern Spanish. The most commonly-cited examples are the terms for "cheese," "head," and "beer," which were cāsus (native Latin word) and caput (ditto), and cevisera (a borrowing from the Celtic Gaulish language—the Romans didn't go in much for beer and saw it as an uncouth drink for northern barbarians) in Classical Latin. Spanish retains cāsus as queso, while more au courant dialects in Italy and Gaul replaced the word for cheese with formāticum (a slang word meaning "formed", because you make cheese in a form) sometime during the Empire (whence Italian formaggio and French fromage). Similarly, Italian testa and French tête for "head" both derive from the Classical Latin testa, meaning "pot", which Imperial-era slang apparently repurposed to mean "head";^note The Ancient Romans were truly the New Yorkers of their era. "Hey, Marius, don't bang your pot on the wall, we can fix this!" the more conservative Spanish dialect seems to have preserved caput, which eventually became cabeza in modern Spanish. Meanwhile, both French and Italian borrow their words for beer (bière, birra) from German Bier, probably because of direct contact with German culture over the centuries, while Spanish retains the old Gaulish-derived cervesa.^note Amusingly, this means Americans requesting a cervesa when ordering a Corona or Tecate are using a word cognate with the Welsh cwrw.

That said, Spanish isn't completely devoid of Germanic influences. The Visigoths ruled the peninsula for about 200 years and left their mark on the language. Their biggest influence is in personal names (for instance, many quintessentially Spanish masculine names, like Ricardo, Fernando and Álvaro, are Gothic names), but it also seems to have added a few vocabulary items (e.g. ganso for goose—the Latin word was anser, the Gothic was gans as in modern Dutch and German). Also in the post-Roman period it seems that the Basque language started having an effect on the Romance dialects of north-central Iberia, mainly in phonology; the shift from word-initial f to h (e.g. fablar->hablar "to speak") seems to have been Basque influence.

The next big influence on Spanish was Arabic. Between 711 and 718 CE, the Moors—a mix of Arabic-speaking and Berber-speaking Muslims from North Africa—conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula. They famously left a lot of vocabulary starting with a (e.g. aceite, oil, from the Arabic az-zayt, "the oil") or al (e.g. alberca, a pool or pond, from the Arabic al-birka "the pond/pool"). The "a/al" thing is derived from the Arabic al-, the Arabic word for "the"; the reason for the variation, and why the Spanish-speakers included the definite article, is too complicated to discuss here. The same Arabic "al" might also have influenced the pronunciation of the Spanish masculine definite article settling on "el" rather than something closer to its Italian cognate il or something completely different like the Portuguese "o".^note Technically, these are all descended from variations of the Classical Latin ille "that/that one". (Even the Portuguese "o", from a different inflection.) The French le has the same derivation. From ille, el is not especially weird as a derivation; rather, the theory is that the influence of Arabic might have created a glide path for settling on el rather than some hypothetical alternative form. (Lo would suggest itself in Spanish. For one thing, it's directly cognate to the Portuguese "o". But the main thing is that lo actually is used in Spanish, just as the pronoun for the masculine singular direct object. This doesn't mean much on its own, but the feminine equivalent of el is la, which itself is also used as the pronoun for the feminine singular direct object. The irregularity of el as the equivalent for la as the definite article but lo as the equivalent for la as a pronoun is a bit weird for Spanish, which (1) is generally the most regular of the major Romance languages (itself possibly the result of Arabic influence, since Arabic is rigidly regular in its verb and pronoun forms—Arabic nouns are another story but "irregular nouns" are not a thing in Romance) and (2) prefers to have feminine equivalents be the masculine either with a masculine ending substituted with "a" or with an "a" appended. Hence the "Arabic influenced it" theory.) Arabic also bequeathed to Spanish (and Portuguese) its placeholder name for a person—Arabic fulān(ah) became Spanish Fulano/a, "John (Jane) Doe" (or Joe Bloggs or Joe Schmoe or Johnny Q. Public or…).

After Los Reyes Católicos completed the Reconquista, the next major influence on Spanish (and from this point on it's purely vocabulary) is from the Conquista—i.e. from the languages of the lands Spain conquered in the 16th and 17th centuries. Unlike the Romans, the Spanish integrated native languages into their system of government, leading to languages like Classical Nahuatl of Mexico and Quechuan of Peru to stay healthy, develop their own literature and eventually influence Spanish. Indeed, Nahuatl at least actually spread after the Conquista, as imperial administrators brought it with them from the Mexica heartland to regions where Nahuatl had at best been known as a trade language and at worst was completely foreign. It wasn’t until the Bourbon Reforms after the end of the War of the Spanish Succession that Spanish became the primary language of administration, trade, and public life in Spanish America at all levels. In any case, the strongest impact on modern Spanish is probably from Nahuatl, whose names for various New World items generally became the "standard" (see, e.g. the worldwide acceptance of Nahuatl-derived chile (originally chīlli in Classical Nahuatl) over the Taíno-derived South American and Caribbean Spanish term ají for hot peppers, unless we're specifically talking about South American/Caribbean peppers).

After the conquest of the Americas, the biggest influences on Spanish have mainly been internal language changes and the various foreign influences on Spanish dialects, for which see Spanish Accents And Dialects.

Those who write the rules: La Real Academia Española (and friends)

Before starting to explain the language, it's worth noting that, unlike English, the Spanish language has a proper institution which officially regulates its rules: the Royal Spanish Academy, or "Real Academia Española". AKA "la R.A.E.", for short.

The institution was created in 1714 following the model from the "Académie française" in France and the "Accademia della Crusca" in Italy. Its function is to gather and approve officially all the changes in the Spanish language in all the Spanish-speaking world to preserve and maintain its proper use. Every year they take care of including in the dictionary new words and removing unused ones^note Well, at least in theory. RAE is infamous for being painfully slow in acknowledging the most recent developments, specially in the colloquial language. There are plenty of words that took decades to be approved by the academy just because their members kept refusing to accept them as proper. On the other hand, RAE has an additional ill reputation of acknowledging or trying to acknowledge too fast words and expressions that are essentially typos.

Although the headquarters are located in Spain, every single country with enough Spanish speakers has representation in the academy (usually by local language institutions of said countries), and all the differences between dialects are acknowledged.

Even the United States has representation since 1985 by the North American Academy of the Spanish Language. Which makes sense—by total number of speakers, the United States is the fifth-largest Spanish-speaking country. More Americans speak fluent or near-fluent Spanish (about 42 million) than there are Venezuelans in total (about 32 million).

Nouns

Nouns ain't too complicated in Spanish. Unlike its predecessor Latin, which had a casserole of case endings depending on how the noun was used in a sentence, Spanish has nothing in that regard. Pan (bread) will stay pan no matter where or how it's used.

One thing that does present occasional problems (for English speakers primarily) is the gender. It's mostly an arbitrary attribute of the noun (el palo, "stick," masculine; la mesa, "table," feminine; it depends on usage, too: a hair dryer is masculine ("secador de pelo"), while the clothes dryer is feminine ("secadora de ropa"). However, when it comes to things that have actual gender they cling to that. A male cat is "un gato", while a female cat is "una gata". Not all names of gendered creatures have gendered forms, though, but in those cases the gender is easily identified by the article and/or adjective (i.e.: "bobcat" would be "el lince" and "la lince", respectively).

Gender is quite a bit more intuitive than in many languages as well; in most cases, a noun's gender is clear from its ending; -o/-an/-aje/-ón is almost always masculine, whereas -a/-ión/-ad/-ud is almost always feminine... though not to say that there aren't exceptions^note like la mano ("hand") or el idioma ("language").. Masculine nouns are more common than feminine ones, so if you're really lost, guess masculine. Plural nouns that contain both masculine and feminine elements are mostly referred to as masculine; los gatos could mean "the [male] cats" or "the [male and female] cats," while las gatas can only refer to "the [female] cats."^note In recent years this usage has become quite controversial in a few Spanish speaking countries, Spain included, since some people are starting to consider it sexist, and promote the use both the plural masculine AND plural feminine together to be inclusive. Which creates the problem of making sentences much longer and arguably impractical, which has led some others to suggest possible gender-neutral forms... which in turn leads to traditionalists accusing everyone else of polluting the language. Let us say, it's a debate that has no clear end in sight. That said, given the relative simplicity of Spanish grammatical gender compared to other Romance languages, several observers have suggested that Spanish might simply more or less drop the whole concept by the 22nd century. (It would likely be the first Romance language to do so—not counting Romance creoles—but hardly the first Indo-European language, English merely being the most prominent.)

Of course, like any other language with gender, Spanish has its own headache-inducing part of it, and that would be the fact that some feminine nouns take the masculine singular article, while still being feminine grammatically (e.g., declension of adjectives), mostly for "flow" reasons. This occurs exclusively with feminine nouns that have a stressed a sound at the beginning. Thus, though still grammatically feminine, águila ("eagle") takes the masculine article as el águila. For amiga ("[female] friend"), however, la is used, because the a sound is not stressed^note It's "el AH-ghee-lah" but "lah ah-MEE-gah". With the plurals, this rule is disregarded, because las does not interrupt the flow.

Finally, a few words actually have different meanings depending on the gender assigned to them. For example, el capital means capital as in money, but la capital means capital as in a capital city. However, there are a few words where gender doesn't matter: el mar and la mar both mean "the sea", although used in different contexts (la mar usually sounds more poetic, and thus it's rarely used).

Pronouns

Pronouns in Spanish are used in a very similar fashion to English; however, subject pronouns are often omitted unless the sentence requires additional emphasis. This is done because the verb already says who is the one acting and the subject pronoun doesn't convey any further information. Addition of unnecessary pronouns easily gives away that the writer has not gone past a few years of Spanish. The sentence Hoy yo como en casa de mi madre (I'm eating at my mother's house today), for example, doesn't seem too fluent because of the first person pronoun yo. The only commonly used subject pronouns are the third person ones, due to the ambiguity lacking a pronoun can sometimes cause, and yo in tenses where the first-person-singular and third-person-singular are identical (i.e., imperfect, conditional, and all subjunctive tenses). However, these are also often omitted if it's clear who the speaker is talking about.

Regarding tú and usted (the singular 2nd person pronouns), it really depends on where you are what pronoun you use in most situations. In Spain, for instance, usted is used mostly in formal speech (people who you don't know and/or are much older than you), while with anyone you already know or someone you meet and want to continue to meet in the future, you use tú, unless it's official business. In many Latin American countries, however, tú is seen as somewhat disrespectful by people who aren't your peers; business colleagues who have worked together for years will still use usted with each other. Note also that in several Latin American countries around the Rio de la Plata, as well as in parts of Central America, vos is used instead of tú. Argentina is the most popular example of this.

On vosotros and ustedes (the plural 2nd person pronouns) meanwhile, vosotros is used only in Spain, and following the same rule of thumb as with tú and usted (as in vosotros in casual speech and ustedes in formal speech). If you use it in Latin America, at best it sounds like "tally-ho, guvnah!" in the United States, but most likely it will usually sound like saying "thou haveth a good morrow?" in Modern English. You can get away with it as a nonnative speaker, but try to stick to ustedes even if you're in full-blown ceceo mode (more on that later as well). Also in Spain itself people will always understand you if you use ustedes (although it may sound a little weird to them if you manage to make friends with them—unless you studiously adopt a Latin American accent as well^note Which isn't so hard, as the "international standard" Spanish commonly taught to foreign students is more or less Latin American, and is best seen as a kind of weird hybrid of Mexican and Colombian. Except that they still try to teach you the vosotros forms, if only to avoid confusion when a Spaniard talks at you.) so it's a safe bet.

Verbs

Of course, like any other language, Spanish has its area that makes nonnatives (and sometimes even natives) want to give themselves a lobotomy. In Spanish, like many other Romance languages, that would be verb conjugations.

The three possible verb endings are -ar, -er, and -ir. Each has its own conjugation patterns (now with 40% more irregulars!) for each tense, of which there are seventeen. Let's have a look at the conjugation tablets for three regular verbs of each type—hablar (to speak), comer (to eat) and vivir (to live)—in present tense, indicative mood:

• yo: hablo, como, vivo
• tú: hablas, comes, vives
• él/ella/usted: habla, come, vive
• nosotros/as: hablamos, comemos, vivimos
• vosotros/as: habláis, coméis, vivís
• ellos/ellas/ustedes: hablan, comen, viven

Having fun yet? And that's just one tense out of seventeen, which are divided in three categories: Indicative (indicativo, which has ten tenses), Subjunctive (subjuntivo, which has six) and Imperative (imperativo, which has only one). Every single tense has a table like this. Oh, and to add to the fun, in the Rioplatense dialect (Argentina, Uruguay, etc.) the pronoun vos has its own separate conjugation! So instead of hablas, it's vos hablás. On the other other hand, you can almost completely ignore the "vosotros/as" form if you're focused on Latin American Spanish—it's not used anywhere in Latin America (the Rio de la Plata included), so you only need to be vaguely aware it exists in case you ever speak with/read something written by or for Spaniards. (As mentioned above, Spaniards won't generally bat an eye if you don't use the vosotros form, especially if your speech is otherwise Latin American, so you only need to know that Spain Spanish has a weird second-person plural form to actually get by, you don't need to be able to produce it yourself.)

If you're really curious, here are the full conjugation tablets for the three verbs above: hablar, comer, vivir (we have to confess, though: half the conjugations are composed forms and a few aren't even used).

The seventeen tenses, with usage notes, are as follows:

• Indicative (indicativo):
  • Present (presente): Exactly What It Says on the Tin. While the progressive form does exist in Spanish, it's much less commonly used; the basic present form is typically used instead. By far the most important tense.
  • Preterite (pretérito): The "once" or "X times" past. Distinct from the imperfect. Also, unlike English, used to describe pictures and the like; to ask "What's she saying?" for a comic book panel or somesuch would be "¿Qué dijo ella?" Also often used in speech to replace the perfect tense, somewhat akin to English, especially around the Rio de la Plata. In Spain, on the other hand, is not as commonly used. Only when the action described is considered to be in the relatively distant past.
  • Imperfect (imperfecto): The "continuous" past. A tense of considerable importance. Some verbs only retain their past meaning in the imperfect and take on new meanings in the preterite; for example, "Yo ya sabía", (I already knew), but "Supe ayer" (I found out yesterday). Both forms are from saber, "to know." Also used for English past progressive, as in, "El esclavo llevaba la jarra cuando la dejó caer." - "The slave was carrying the jug when he dropped it."
  • Future (futuro): Describes future events. Actually considered somewhat "high" speech, something like English "shall"; usually, the ir a + [infinitive] construction replaces it, like English "going to"/"gonna." Also used for certain statements regarding uncertainty or wondering, such as, "¿Qué hora será?", "What time could it be?"
  • Conditional (condicional): Used to express things that would happen if a certain condition were met. For example: "Yo iría con ustedes, pero tengo que estudiar." (I would go with you guys, but I have to study.) If you didn't have to study, you'd be going with them, but you do, so you're not.
  • Present perfect (pretérito perfecto): Essentially identical to the same tense in English; the best way to explain it is a "past action with present consequences." A compound tense, formed with a present tense form of haber. Often replaced by the preterite in casual speech in Latin American countries (in Spain too, although not as common). "Ya te he dicho lo que pienso." = "Ya te dije lo que pienso." "I [have] already told you what I think."
  • Pluperfect (pretérito pluscuamperfecto): Again, essentially identical to the same tense in English. Used to describe something that had already happened before something else did. Another compound tense.
  • Past anterior (pretérito anterior): Archaic, essentially replaced by the pluperfect, or in some cases the preterite.
  • Future perfect (futuro compuesto): Used to express things that will have happened before something else does, essentially the same as in English, as you can see in this very sentence.
  • Conditional perfect (condicional compuesto): Used to express a "hypothetical past action"; something that would have happened had a condition been met. Think of the last line every Scooby-Doo villain says: "And I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for You Meddling Kids!" In Spanish, they would use the conditional perfect. ("¡Y habría tenido éxito sin ustedes, muchachos entrometidos!")
• Subjunctive (subjuntivo)
  • Subjunctive present (presente de subjuntivo): Hoo boy. The subjunctive forms are used when dealing with something that is either a wish, uncertain, or just not necessarily real (which extends to a lot more things than you might think). It's virtually always in a clause with que. The exact peculiarities of the subjunctive mood are very, very complicated, but suffice to say, if it has a que clause and you're not 100% certain it's real, go with the subjunctive. The subjunctive present specifically is used when the preceding clause is in the present or future tense.
  • Subjunctive imperfect (imperfecto de subjuntivo): The subtleties of the subjunctive mood were explained above. This one is used when the preceding clause is in the imperfect, preterite, conditional, or the present, past, and conditional perfects. Also used to express the condition used to fulfill the conditional tense: "Yo comería si tuviera hambre." (I'd eat if I were hungry.) Notably, this has two conjugation variants: the nowadays more common one ends in -ra, while the less common, more formal variant ends in -se. Tuviera in the previous example could have been easily replaced by tuviese with no change in meaning.
  • Subjunctive future (futuro de subjuntivo): Virtually obsolete, except in legalese. It used to be used when the preceding clause was in the future tense, which has been overtaken by the subjunctive present.
  • Subjunctive present perfect (pretérito perfecto de subjuntivo): Used primarily to express subjunctive past actions when the the preceding clause was in the present tense.
  • Subjunctive pluperfect (pretérito pluscuamperfecto de subjuntivo): Used to express the condition of something for the conditional tense primarily.
  • Subjunctive future prefect (futuro compuesto de subjuntivo): Obsolete entirely.
• Imperative (imperativo): Used to give commands. This is actually an incomplete tense; commands can obviously only be given to a "you," or as a "let's [do something]." For the tú and vosotros forms, there are actually two forms, affirmative and negative (both the negative and any extra forms, like for usted or nosotros, are taken straight from the subjunctive; the vos form, like in every other instance, is a deformation from the vosotros form).

Spelling, Sounds, Accents and the Like

Spanish's sound system and especially its orthography aren't that hard to get used to. Spelling gives all the info needed for pronunciation (the opposite is not always true, though) and each letter has one pronunciation (with the exception of c and g); you don't have the long vs. short vowel distinction that can cause a minor fiasco in some other languages like English.

There are digraphs, for the records.

• A: like father
• E: between bed and bay; more towards bay at the end of a word.
• I: like seem
• O: like hole
• U: like rude

Fun fact, Spanish vowel sounds are literally identical to Japanese vowel sounds, so you can use those for reference if you know them. As a matter of fact, Spanish and Japanese phonetics are shockingly similar in general, despite how different they are in pretty much everything else.^note Due to this, the Japanese language is ridiculously easy to pronounce for native Spanish speakers. For native Japanese speakers, the opposite is a bit more difficult due to sounds like the strong, rolling "R", but still, it's easier for them to pronounce Spanish than to pronounce English.

The following letters and digraphs are noticeably different from English pronunciation:

• B: Pronounced like a mishmash of w, b, and v between vowels.
• C: In Spain, before i or e, pronounced like the th in think but drawn out like s. In Latin America, it's s like in English. Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, thinco, thinco, seis!
• CH: In most dialects, always like in match, unless the word is foreign. In New Mexico, the Mexican state of Chihuahua and some parts of southern Spain, however, it's generally a sh sound.
• D: Between vowels, often pronounced in Spain like a soft, voiced th, as in this, or not pronounced at all in some New World dialects where, for instance, pescado (fish) is spoken as pecao.
• G: Also before e or i, this changes from the normal goat sound into, depending on the region, either the h in house, the ch in loch or Bach, or (especially in Spain) a voiceless uvular fricative, which sounds like a voiceless French R. Between vowels it is reduced to a very weak sound in virtually all dialects.
• GU: A hard g in front of e or i; gw in all other cases (although the g is removed in some varieties).
• GÜ: Like gw; used before e and i to indicate the u is not silent, as it normally would be per the above rule.
• H: Never, ever said except in loanwords. It's written mostly to prevent two vowels being next to each other when unnecessary (like in ahogandose, pronounced ow-gan-doe-say).
• J: Same as the soft G pronunciation. If you ever see Hispanics on Facebook typing "jajajaja", this is why.
• LL: Its canonical pronunciation is rather like the Italian gl as in figlio or the Portuguese lh as in filho. However, in most dialects the pronunciation has become like the y in year or like the J in "jail" (a phenomenon called yeismo ("y-ism"), since consonantal "y" is usually realized somewhere in that range in Spanish). The only strong hold-out of the primitive pronunciation is Catalonia, where the same sound is an important part of the Catalan language and its standard accent. In the area around Rio de La Plata, instead, it's pronounced as the sh in show or the s in measure, in Guatemala, it becomes a sound somewhere between i and j, and in New Mexico, it's generally omitted entirely, such that ellos becomes éos.
  • In dialects of Catalan (Català, Aragonés, Valenciana, Menorquinés, etc.) there is the ligature ĿL, which signifies two 'L's next to each other that should be pronounced like two British 'l's: one ending its syllable and the second starting the next, instead of the standard double l sound as in Spanish. As it's only used in the middle of words, you'll only see it as "ŀl" or "l·l". That dot in the middle is called an interpunct.
  • The word llama seems to have three different translations into English. "Llama": the domesticated South American Camelid. Llama as a conjugation that can mean "he/she calls" or "You, call!". And "llama" as in "Flame". ^note This is the Catchphrase of The Human Torch, Saying "¡llamas a mí! Loosely meaning "Flames, come to me!"
• QU: Always a k. "Quiero que el queso se quede" is pronounced "Kyero ke el keso se kede." (Incidentally, that means "I want the cheese to stay.")
• R: Flapped, as in the d's in pudding. Being otaku helps here: it's the same Japanese phoneme that is romanized as an "r". However, when it follows a consonant or it's the first letter of a word, then it reads as...
• RR: The famous "rolled r," as in the ridiculously exaggerated ¡Arrrrrrrrrrrriba! Think making a chainsaw or machine gun noise with your mouth. If you don't get it right, don't worry too much: this is one of the most difficult sounds for nonnatives, and natives usually understand that. In some parts of Central and South America it is often not pronounced like the standard, some people pronounce it like almost like the "s" in "pressure", while in other people it comes close to an English r. In several Caribbean dialects, it becomes a guttural ch (like loch or Bach).
• S: In Latin America this sounds just like in English, while in European pronunciation it may sound like "sh" at first, but it actually is a sound between "s" and "sh" that takes some time to learn to make. However, in most Latin American dialects (Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica being notables exceptions) as well as in southern Spain, "s" is often turned into an "h" sound, or even omitted entirely, when it comes before a consonant or at the end of the a word.^note As in, "Tú cre' que en otro' lado' lah alga' ma' werde' son...", or in Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador's famously attributed quote, "¡Ehto é un compló!"
• SH: According to the RAE, this digraph is pronounced like an "s", because the H is mute. In Latin America, due to influence from the superpowerful USA, this digraph is pronounced like an English "sh". You will also hear the "sh" phoneme in places like Argentina, where LL and Y are pronounced this way, or Chihuahua, Mexico, where the CH is slurred into a "sh".
• V: Pronounced like a b. The real difference is tricky, as classical language rules establish they should be pronounced more like the English v between vowels, but common Spanish doesn't really distinguish, and virtually all the forms of the language treat it as a second b.
• X: In standard Spanish it's always pronounced as in "ax." But Spaniards used it to represent several different sounds on Aztec and Mayan languages, so in Mayincatec words that crossed over to Mexican Spanish it can be read like "s", "sh", "j" (That's how you should pronounce it "Mexico", by the way) and also "x".
• Y: Pronounced like LL in most dialects, and like "sh" in the Rioplatense dialect. When ending a word, like a semiconsonantal i. (rey, "king," is read as "ray")
• Z: Pronounced, again only in Spain, as a "th." In Latin America it's an S.

While we're on the z and c sounds...

Lithpth and Shoshos: Spanish Dialects and Accents

The biggest contrast among the dialects is between the Spanish spoken in Spain^* usually referred to as "Castilian Spanish", "European Spanish" or "peninsular Spanish" or "Spanish of Spain," because "Spanish Spanish" just sounds stupid and Latin American Spanish. This is best seen in two features, ceceo/seseo and the vosotros pronoun and conjugation.

Ceceo and seseo refer to how soft c and z are pronounced in various regions. As noted above, in Spain, those two letters are pronounced like an English unvoiced th ("ceceo"). In Latin America, they pronounced both as an s (seseo), which makes learning English phonology slightly more difficult, but also is more intuitive to English speakers learning Spanish. On the other end of the spectrum, there are some regions in Spain, especially in the South, where all "s" sounds are pronounced like th, even standalone S's. So you get things like, "¡Por favor, Theñor Jueth, no mande uthted mi hijo a prithión!" ^* Please, Mr. Judge, don't send my son to prison! In normal spelling: "Por favor, Señor Juez, no mande usted mi hijo a prisión" Thus the famous "Spaniard lisp," that you see in lots of Antonio Banderas movies (him being from Málaga, in Southern Spain).

In Spain, however, ceceo gets a different meaning. As the th pronounciation is spread all over the country, the term ceceo is reserved for the example above in which all the s are also replaced by th. Pronouncing the sounds differently, which would be considered ceceo in Latin America, is called distinción (distinction) in Spain.^* In certain parts of the Spanish region of Andalusia, one can find seseo, ceceo and distinción speakers just a few kilometres away. For instance, regarding the words casa (house) and caza (hunt):

• For a seseo speaker, both are pronounced casa.
• For a total ceceo speaker, both are pronounced "catha".
• For a distinción speaker, they're pronounced casa and "catha", respectively.

The other major difference is the vosotros pronoun. It is used only in Spain, replaced by ustedes in all of Latin America, though a few isolated areas retain the conjugation but not the pronoun itself. As explained before, vosotros is the second person, plural, familiar register pronoun, essentially a plural tú, and enjoys common usage in Spain, but in Latin America sounds like a thick South London accent and dialect would in the US.

There is a special pronoun that is used in some areas of South America, however, which is amusingly derived from vosotros, vos. This dialect is known as voseo, and is used primarily in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Colombia, and is popular in some Central American countries and the southernmost regions of Mexico. The conjugation of the vos pronoun is a modified form of the vosotros conjugation, resulting in tú puedes becoming vos podés (compare vosotros podéis)^* The stem doesn't change from o->ue here because the stem only changes if the stress is on that syllable; the stress is moved here to the second syllable and thus the stem change doesn't occur. (Except in Chile, which uses a different conjugation of vos, with the verb poder becoming vos podí or vos podéi)

Voseo happens to be one of the features of the Rioplatense dialect, which takes its name from the Rio de la Plata, the area where it's spoken; this is mainly the countries of Argentina and Uruguay. The other main features of the dialect are the consonantal shift of y and ll to either a sh or zh (measure) sound, hence the "Shoshos" (Yoyos) of the title, resulting in ayer sounding like "ah-SHARE" or "ah-ZHARE" instead of "ah-YAIR"; and also the almost entire elimination of the present perfect tense, which enjoys some usage in most other areas.

In the United States, meanwhile, there is a native Spanish dialect spoken in New Mexico and Colorado by neomexicanos, descendants of Spanish settlers who lived there before the annexation of the Southwest by the States. Generally called New Mexican Spanish, it preserves several features of Early Modern Spanish lost in most other varieties, such as ser being conjugated in the first person as yo seigo, rather than yo soy, and haiga rather than haya being the subjunctive of haber (also used in Mexico, albeit with connotations of poor literacy). It suffered a decline in the 20th century as English came to dominate, but the recent influx of Latino immigrants has ensured the dialect's survival. English has left an unmistakable mark on the dialect, however, and many words are of English origin adapted into Spanish phonology, e.g. troca for "truck" rather than camioneta.

Acentos y tildes: ¡un montón de ñaña! Aparte, ¿qué pasó con la puntuación?

One famous feature of Spanish orthography is its diacritics, specifically acute accents and tildes. The acute accents, unlike some other languages, such as Hungarian or Polish, where they distinguish sounds, accents in Spanish are used only to mark stress or to distinguish homonyms. You'll notice, however, that it's not marked on every word, the rules for the marking are very straightforward, so if you learn them, as mentioned before, the spelling gives you all the information for pronunciation. The words are divided as:

• Agudas (Acute): They have the accent on the last syllable. Are marked when they end in n, s, or vowel. Examples: Calor, Beber, Sudor, Lombriz, Camión, Jamás, Rubí, Café
• Llanas/Graves (Graves): They have the accent on the second-to-last syllable. Are marked when they end in consonant different than n or s. Examples. Guerra, Gato, Radio, Flores, Lápiz, Árbol, Cárcel, Difícil, Azúcar.
• Esdrújulas (Em... Esdrujulas? Well, at least it's better than the English name for it, which is proparoxytone): They have the accent on the third-to-last syllable. They are always marked. Examples: Brújula, Bélgica, Séptimo, Máximo, Ejército, Hígado, Pájaro.

Besides the acute accent, Spanish is also famous for the eñe letter, "ñ." This is pronounced approximately^* You make the ñ by pronouncing a n and a y simultaneously. It's easier than it sounds, really. like "ny," so "ñoño" above would be pronounced "nyonyo" (a word that more or less means "cheesy" in Spain and "nerd" un Mexico). For another example, the English word "canyon" is derived from the Spanish "cañón." The Portuguese have their own version of this sound in nh (as in "senhora"), while French and Italians use gn (as in "guignol") instead.

Also used is the letter "ü", with the diaeresis. It is used to distinguish between "gue"/"gui" and "güe"/"güi", where in the latter, the "u" is not silent. Compare guitarra (guitar) and pingüino (penguin), and guerra (war) and nicaragüense (Nicaraguan).

Another difference of Spanish punctuation is their disuse of quotation marks. Dialogue is denoted by long "em" dashes (—), and quotes and phrases are surrounded by «comillas angulares.», or angular quotes, used in most Romance languages. If you're from the Americas this might come as a bit of a surprise for you, because despite being the actually correct ones as specified by the RAE, «angular quotes» are in practice pretty much exclusive to Spain; in Latin America, everybody uses American English "quotation marks" (despite that, the use of quotation marks is becoming steadily more prevalent even in Spain, outside of dialogue).

Decimal separators also depend on the region. In Spain and some countries in Latin America, the thousands separator is a period and the fractional separator is a comma (ten thousand and a half in Spain = 10.000,5); while in other parts of Latin America, just like in American English, the thousands separator is a comma and the fractional separator is a period (ten thousand and a half in Mexico = 10,000.5).

But perhaps the most famous feature of Spanish orthography is the inverted question mark (or "interrogation point," for any Brits reading this) and exclamation point. Like just about any feature of language, this has its uses—it helps isolate the question or exclamation in a compound sentence, for example—but these two marks are so rare among languages that they're often simply called "that Spanish upside-down thing."

The title of this section, incidentally, means "Accents and Tildes: A Load of Crap! Also, what happened with the punctuation?"

No molestar - False Friends, Swear Words, and Other Things

The nature of semantic drift naturally ensures that "false friends" will arise. Probably the most famous, as shown above, is molestar, which is a perfectly innocent and mundane word in Spanish meaning "bother," but obviously means something more... extreme in English. This really isn't that difficult, but an English speaker who's sort of half-listening may still be caught off guard by a phrase such as, Aunque él me molestaba a veces, yo le amaba. ("Even though he bothered me sometimes, I loved him." We're not talking abusive relationships here). Funnily enough, this can also happen with Spanish speaking natives when trying to speak English ("Teacher, teacher! He's molesting me!")

Another potentially hilarious false friend is embarazar, the opposite situation of molestar; it means "impregnate," not "embarrass," which in Spanish is avergonzar or humillar (lit. "shame" or "humiliate"). This led to a rather famous case of Bite the Wax Tadpole where a pen company advertised their product with the slogan, "It won't leak in your pocket and get you pregnant." One has to wonder exactly what sort of ink such a pen would be using...

But the most irritating false friends have to be the troll pair of atender and asistir. They sound like English "attend" and "assist" respectively, so you'd think this would be easy, right? Wrong. Atender means "to assist"...and asistir means "to attend"!^* Although you can follow the logic of atender = assist if you keep in mind the secondary meaning of "attend," as in, "attend to the injured."

And on top of that, we have region-specific false friends: "bizarro", according to the RAE, actually means either "brave" or "generous"... but that's only in Spain, because in Latin America, where the language is influenced by American English, "bizarro" is usually taken to mean "bizarre"! However, this meaning started to spread to Spain as well in The New '10s, so many modern Spaniards will let it pass.

Profanity

Now for the good stuff, though: profanity! We've saved the best for last. Here are all the expressions you need to know to know when to hit someone (when they're said to you) or duck (when you say them). Also convenient for use in non-Spanish-speaking circles.

• Mierda: "shit" (chances are you already knew this one). In Spain can also translate as an interjection in the vein of "Damn!"
• Cojones:^* Not "cajones", although non-native speakers sometimes confuse the two. Saying that someone has a lot of cajones means that they have a lot of drawers. Spain only. This is more profane word for balls, the usual, milder ones being huevos (which is also the word for eggs) and bolas or pelotas (which actually means "balls"). Quite a few expresions arise from this one: the verb acojonar(se) means "to (get) scare(d)" and is generally used to remark how much of a coward the guy who got scared is (it's in fact a deformation of acongojar(se) due to phonetic similarities, but the original verb is now only used in formal situations, by extremely polite people or people with extreme aversion to curse words). Cojonudo roughly translates to "fucking good". The expression tocar los cojones (literally "touching the balls") can either mean "to be a lazy fuck" or "to piss someone off" depending on whether the metaforical balls belong to the person touching them or not. Calling someone a mosca cojonera ("balls-y fly") implies that they are as annoying as, well, having a fly in the balls.
• Carajo: An interjection roughly equivalent to "damn", "fuck", or in some cases "hell" ("vete al carajo" can be half-literally translated as "go to hell"). In Venezuela, along with the interjection use, is also used as a sightly more vulgar equivalent of "dude", even having a female and a diminutive version to refer to women and small children. "Estar del carajo", however, means that something/someone is doing very well (although in Spain, while correct, it tends to be used sarcastically to mean very bad instead). May or may not also mean dick in some places.
  • We'd be remiss if we didn't mention here the order of the Venezuelan general and hero of the Wars of Independence José Antonio Páez in the Battle of Las Queseras del Medio, in which he "officially" gave his cavalry the order "about face" (¡Vuelvan caras!) but probably actually told them "Turn around, for fuck's sake!" (¡Vuelvan, carajo!).
• Cabrón (lit. "big goat"): translates as "cuckold", but in dialogue equates more to "asshole", "fucker" or "bastard". Can be used casually among friends, but absolutely not with strangers.
• Capullo (lit. "cocoon" or "flower bud"): slang for "prepuce" or "foreskin", although, like the previous, it's a tamer synonym for "Cabrón" in Spain. "¡Eres un capullo!" would more accurately translate to "You're a dick!".
• Pendejo: slang for "pubic hair", although roughly used as "idiot" or "jackass", with an added connotation of willful incompetence. Almost exclusive to Latin America, with Spaniards only using it whenever they want to invoke Latin stereotypes. It's a derogative word for a young person in Chile and Argentina, and for a particularly dumb or mean person in Mexico. There was a scandal in Venezuela when the late politician and intelectual Arturo Uslar Pietri used the word on a TV interview in 1989 to refer to honest everymen, not because the meaning but because at the time the word was considered too strong for broadcasting (while in real life it is relatively mild).
• Joder: "fuck". It's used like it is in English; estamos jodidos means "we're fucked." Almost never conjugated in anything but past participle (the expletive "fuck!" would simply be joder! and "that fucking test" would be Ese jodido examen, although most would say puto or something similar instead). "Fuck you!" would be translated as ¡Jódete! or ¡Que te jodan!. It is also a vulgar word for bother (compare "fuck with"). Almost parodically Spanish—it is used in Latin America occasionally, but usually it's associated with Spaniards.
• Chingar: "fuck". Almost an exact synonym for joder. The difference is that it is used most often in Mexico, whereas joder is practically a comma for the Spanish. ("Chingón" is a particularly sterotypically Mexican term that means roughly "fucker", but frequently admiringly, the way a crochety old man from Newark might say it—"A Mario, ¿como está el viejo chingón?" translates roughly to "Whaddabout Mario, how is the old fucker?").
• Follar: synonym for "fuck" as a verb, although only when it refers to the specific biological act of intercourse. Extremely vulgar, it is not usually heard outside of Spain, since most swear-worthy situations are covered by joder or chingar. "¡Que te follen!" would be an alternative translation for "Fuck you!".
• ¿Qué diablos? or ¿Qué demonios? (lit. "What devils?" or "What demons?"): Pretty much exactly "What the Devil?"—an archaic, Gosh Dang It to Heck! way of saying "what the hell?" or "what the fuck?" A related word that is even more archaic is "demontre", also vaguely meaning demon. All of them can also be used as an interjection ("¡demonios!" = roughly "holy shit!").
• Maldito/a: "(God)damn", again, rather used like in English; can be either an interjection or adjective. Like the previous, and very unlike the English equivalent, this word and its religious relatives (like "infierno", meaning literally "hell"; "vete al infierno" = "go to hell") are actually considered very tame in Spanish, almost to the point of Gosh Dang It to Heck!. In fact, they are soft enough to be used in television for the youth slot in Spain and most Latin American countries. However, although not archaic like the previous, they still carry a certain old-fashioned vibe that makes them very rare to hear in the street.
• Maldición (lit. "malediction" or "curse"): commonly translated as "damnit" or similar. Also soft enough for TV.
• Malparido/a (lit. a person who wasn't born the right way, translatable as "abort" or "malformed"): similar in the usage to the English word "bastard". Somewhat archaic, it is quite uncommon in modern Spain out of country/rural context.
• Malnacido: same as before, but a bit more common nowadays in Spain. Still very old-fashioned, though.
• Tomar (lit. "taking"): Latin American slang for drinking spirit. Though to be frank, in most Latin American dialects—including Mexican—it means any kind of drinking. Nunca toma nada sino agua would be the most normal way to say "He drinks nothing but water" in Mexican Spanish; saying Nunca bebe nada sino agua (using the "official" word for "to drink" beber) would register as highly formal. It retains the rest of meanings, being completely innocuous for most situations, such as photography (tomar unas fotos). An important exception would be taking a person to a place, for which the verb "llevar" is used. "Tomé a mi hermana al prom", for example, means you and your sister have some explaining to do. In Spain, tomar only means "taking".
• Puta (lit. "whore", or more generally "bitch"): Exactly What It Says on the Tin; "hijo de puta" equates to "son of a bitch." Beware of this in Spain, since it's the worst insult you can say to a person (one of the six traditional palabras mayores, or "major words", the only one directed against females, although only married, and one of the four that's still in use now). The male form "puto", on the other hand, is a very offensive word for "gay" (think "faggot") when applied to people, but also something more akin to "goddamned" when applied to objects or situations. Also, as mentioned above, "puto/a" can be used as an equivalent to "fucking" ("el puto coche" = "the fucking car"). It is considered substantially milder in this form.
• Coger (lit. "get or take"): it has evolved into "fuck" in most Latin American countries. In Spain, however, it has maintained the literal meaning and is an incredibly common word, which sometimes can cause misunderstandings between Spaniards and Latin Americans. For instance: cogí una magdalena means "I took a muffin" in Spain, but "I fucked a muffin" in Latin America. Recoger is the non-profane version (which in Spain means something similar to "pick up" or "retrieve").
• Cagar (lit. "shitting"): often used to construct colorful oaths like ¡Me cago en la leche! ("I shit in the milk!"), ¡Me cago en la puta! ("I shit in the bitch!"), or even more colorful (only in Spain, and not commonly used), ¡Me cago en la puta de oros! (which is a reference to Spanish playing cards, and when adapted to English cards, it would be something like "I shit in the Jack of Diamonds!"). Mecagüen! and Me cahis en la mar! are the Gosh Dang It to Heck! versions of this. If you want to use these oaths to insult a person in particular, you can use me cago en la cara de tu padre! ("I shit in your father's face!" - very uncommon today, but still effective), me cago en tu puta madre! (I shit in your fucking mother!") or me cago en todos tus muertos! ("I shit in all of your dead relatives!"). Cagada means "shitty" or "full of shit". In some Latin American countries also a slang word for "reprimand", ex: "El profe me cagó por lo del comedor" meaning "The teacher reprimanded me for the cafeteria incident". In Spain, a cagada is something embarrassing, normally used to describe something someone has said with the intention of being funny (but isn't). This is different from "cagarse en alguien" which literally means "to shit on someone" and which basically means to insult somebody with all you've got, and also from "cagarse" which is slang for being scared in some countries. Me cago en Dios ("I shit on God") is still heard in certain areas of Spain, even by religious people, but it's better not to say it if you're in front of someone who is really religious and might get seriously offended.
• Coño (lit. "Country Matters"): exactly that. It is not nearly as offensive as that word is in English (ESPECIALLY in North America), and in fact it is often as an interjection, as in "fuck!"; "¿Qué coño ___?" equates to "What the fuck ___?" in peninsular Spanish (see note below on profanity in Spain). Saying that a person is "un coño de madre/un coño de su madre" means not that they're that part of their mother anatomy, but that the person is a bastard, and the expression "¡El coño de tu madre!" is a direct insult, in some places being even worse than calling the person "hijo de puta". There is also the milder derivate word "coñazo", that in Spain means something among bothersome or annoying (as in "esa persona es un coñazo", that person is very annoying) but in Venezuela means "beating" (te voy a meter un coñazo = I'm going to hit you hard). Nowadays, Spain is the only country that still uses the word on its original sexual context: the rest of the Spanish speaking countries simply see it as another vulgar interjection. Within Latin America, use of ¡coño! as a vulgar interjection is seen as parodically Cuban in much the same way as interjections of ¡joder! are parodically Spanish.
• Culo (lit. "ass"): Yes, like the Pitbull song. Used in pretty much the same situations as in English and then some more. De mi culo is "my ass" in some Latin American countries. In those, a father of a teenage daughter, when she says where she goes with her date, may say "'Vamos al cine' de mi culo." ("'We're going to the movies' my ass."). In Spain it's also used in the construction "de culo" for "screwed"; "Vamos de culo" means "We're screwed." Venezuelan males also use the term to refer to a one-night stand or someone they have a superficial sex-based relationship (but never saying it in front of the person); "ese un culo que me levanté anoche" means "a girl I picked up last night".
• Pajero (lit. "Wanker"/"douchebag"/"jackoff"): exactly that. Mitsubishi fortunately avoided biting the wax tadpole on this one and sold their model as "Montero" (mountaineer) in Spanish speaking countries. Amusingly, the car gets its name from the Argentine/Rioplatense Spanish term for the Pampas cat; this animal really is called the gato pajero in Argentina with no particular implication that the feline much cares for self-pleasure or is a self-involved arsehole (well, no more than any other wildcat). In Chile it's also a pejorative term for a lazy and/or slow person: "Apúrate, pajero!" would mean "Hurry up, stupid slouch!"
• Polla (lit. "female chick"): a very vulgar synonym of "dick". It should never be used for anything else unless you want to risk ofending someone, at least in Spain. ¡Chupame la polla! means "Suck my dick!"
• Gilipollas: One of the most common insults in Spain, and nowhere else. It doesn't have a literal translation, though the "-pollas" at the end comes from where you think it comes from. It would be a rough equivalent to "dumbass", although its usage is somewhat more offensive, akin to "asshole". This word also has a tamer Unusual Euphemism version in "gilipuertas", which subtitutes "pollas" ("dicks") with "puertas" ("doors") and counts as Gosh Dang It to Heck! unless in a very comedic context. In Catalonia (North East of Spain) it's also used the short form "Gilí", which is considered a kinda "softer" version of the word. Said shorter version may be the origin of the even shorter "Gil", which is used in Argentina to mean "dumbass".
• Arrecho: Unused in Spain, it means "horny" in some other countries. In Venezuela and Colombia in particular, however, it means "furious" when applied to people, and "spectacular" when applied to objects (to wit. "Estoy arrecho": I'm furious, "Soy arrecho": I'm awesome).
• Pinche (lit. "kitchen helper"): its original meaning is still maintained in Spain, but in Mexico this word evolved into an interjection to emphasize something, similar to "fucking" in English: "una pinche cerveza" means "a fucking beer". It can also be used to express contempt for something; if you hate your mother-in-law's yappy little dog, you might say "¡Pinche perrito!" ("Fucking little dog!").
• Güey (corruption of "buey", "ox"): A Mexican expression in reference of being dumb like an ox. Being "güey" means being dumb, incompetent or ignorant; "hacerse güey" means pretending to not know about something. Also used in Mexico as a pronoun or an interjection, in which case it's usually slurred into "wey": "me voy con este wey" means "I'm going with this guy", and "¡AY WEY!" means "OH SHIT!". A common use is "Este güey..." (which can be pronounced slurred or unslurred, as you wish), which means, roughly, "this motherfucker..." and is usually accompanied with an eyeroll. This word was popularized by standup comedian and entertainer Adal Ramones, who found out that this word was not blacklisted by official censorship rules, and as a result proceeded to abuse the hell out of it during his TV performances.
• Verga (lit. "stick" or "sailing yard"): "dick" in Mexico, Venezuela and Spain. When this word is inappropriate, some radar-safe alternatives include "vaina" ("pod", common in Venezuela, known but less common in Mexico), "vértebra", "verdura" ("vegetable"), "Bergen" (German for "mountains") and "versh" (cf. Youtube animated comedy channel Vete a la Versh).

An interesting note about Spanish is the frequency of Cluster F-Bomb in common speech, particularly in Spain. Spanish speakers tend to use stronger swear words and use them more often, especially compared to English speakers in their own language. The prevalence of this in Spain is said to be due to the Franco regime's oppressive enforcement of clean-mouthed-ness; when that regime fell in the late 1970s, people began cussing left, right, and center. By far the most common word is "joder", the proper inflection and placement of which takes practice, said by everybody from chavales (boys, preteens), to abuelitas (little old ladies).

Actually, the prevalence of profanity in Spain is so extended that, when it's in an informal situation and among friends, swearing on its own may easily be seen as relatively innocent. As a result, Spaniards rely a lot more on voice tone, body language and timing in the dialogue to distinguish between playful banter and actual rude behaviour. Getting this right may be a bit tricky at first for non-native speakers, though. However, since this is meant to be done with friends, most likely Spaniard friends will be delighted to teach you the fine art of spicy, swearing-ridden Spaniard chatting.

Truly offensive peninsular profanity relies a lot on creativity and especially blasphemy. Spain is a country with deep Catholic roots, but in the last centuries it evolved gradually into its direct opposite, and nowadays it keeps instead a heartfelt disdain for Christianity and religion in general (another consequence of the Franco regime, though anti-clericalism was already present in Spain due to the last years of The Spanish Inquisition and several Church-sponsored absolute monarchies). As a consequence, there is a ton of swearing based on religious imagery, a bit like the Québecois sacres. Hostias, or "host" (as in sacrament)^note Compare to Québecois hostie is somewhat more offensive than "joder", while Me cago en Dios y las tetas de la Virgen (I shit upon God and the Virgin's tits) means you probably just amputated something. Without anesthetic and most probably by accident.

Overtly agressive or profane swearing (even moreso than these latter examples) is possible, but rare and mostly used in derivative works for comedic effect, such as "Te voy a sacar los putos ojos y me voy a mear en los agujeros para que te escueza"^* "I'm going to gouge your fucking eyes out and piss in the holes till it burns. Spaniards are perceived as more profane than Latin Americans, not because this is fundamentally true, but because there is more swearing on Spanish TV (sometimes even on family-oriented shows on occassion), while most Latin American countries enforce cleaner language on media to very ridiculous extremes (where even Gosh Dang It to Heck! can be considered too much).

Judaeo-Spanish

Judaeo-Spanish (djudeoespanyol), also known as Ladino, is derived from Old Spanish and is the diaspora language of Iberian (Spanish and Portuguese) Jews, the Sephardim. It has influences from the old Iberian languages - Old Aragonese, Astur-Leonese, Old Catalan, Galician-Portuguese and Mozarabic -, as well as Ottoman Turkish, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic (in religion, law and spirituality), French and Italian (for modern concepts), and Greek and South Slavic languages (because most Iberian Jews lived in the Balkans).

It absorbed Judaeo-Portuguese^note it still exists in a limited liturgical context, spoken by 2,000 people (a language it mutually influenced), Judaeo-Catalan and Judaeo-Aragonese, all of which are now (mostly or wholly) extinct.

It is mainly written in the Latin alphabet, also in Hebrew (how it was originally written) or Cyrillic, and more rarely in Greek and Arabic.

It is spoken by about 60,000-400,000 people worldwide, and it's considered an endangered language.

Haketia and Tetuani Ladino

Haketia, or Western Ladino, was the language spoken by the North African Sephardim. It differed from the version spoken in the Balkans (which may be called Eastern Ladino) because it had a greater influence from Arabic and little to none from the Balkanic languages (since they lived among Arabic people and not in the Balkans).

It is now endangered - even more so than Eastern Ladino - due to two reasons: it did not develop a literary tradition, so it had more difficulties being preserved, and the Spanish and French conquests in northern Africa, as well as large-scale migration of Sephardim to Spain and other Spanish-language countries, made the language being absorved to Spanish.

A special form of Haketia is Tetuani Ladino, historically spoken by Sephardim from Oran, Algeria, who originally migrated from Tetuan, Morocco (hence the name), and is now spoken by a few thousand in mainly Israel.

Haketia is said to have influenced Llanito, the peculiar coloquial form of Spanish spoken in Gibraltar, due to migration by Morrocan Jews.

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