Hey Y'all

Spaniards have their own version of "y'all" -- it's called "vosotros." And just like the American South is in English, Spain is the only Spanish-speaking region where they use the pronoun. And vosotros even has it's own verb conjugations.

In addition to Spain's unified love for "y'all," they have different accents in different parts of the country here too, just like the differences between a southern belle from Alabama and a city girl from Manhattan. Accents are a cool way to embrace regional cultures, but they can also make it hard to understand when traveling.

Before we went to Granada, our program director warned us -- in the South they sometimes just drop syllables off words. Having conservations with the natives was similar to reading texting conversations with all the abbreviations.  Very hard to understand. (Which explains why whenever I pretend to be from Spain when meeting random people, they always ask if I'm from the South.)

Barcelona, on the other hand, was a totally different story. The comunidades autonomicas here have so much autonomy, that some even speak their own languages. And Cataluña, the community in which Barcelona lies, is one of them. Up there, they speak Catalan. It's similar to Spanish, but I definitely couldn't read a newspaper or watch a movie in the language. (There's actually a lot of controversy over what language should be taught in schools there. But once again, autonomy lets the local government decide, to some parents' dismay.)

I think four distinct languages are spoken around Spain, even though the country is only about the size of North Dakota.  However, I did not remember the names of these languages nor their origins on my phonology midterm this morning, and I do not remember them now either.

Anyways, the point of this post is -- before I came to Spain, I just imagined all Spaniards speaking simple Spanish. I forgot about the intricacies of regional variances and the politics of official languages. So my epiphany of today, though it should have been obvious, is that there are different types of accents within every language.