"Ya, po, huevon.."

I like being a linguist for more than it making a good topic of conversation at parties or knowing that my fellow linguists are some of the weirdest, nerdiest people in the whole world ( seriously- have you ever been to a linguist party?). It also means that I can be very easily entertained, almost anywhere, simply by sitting back and observing the way people talk. Because there's always something interesting going on.

Only having arrived in Argentina a couple of days ago, the language is one of the few striking differences between Argentina and Chile I've been able to observe.

When I was in Chile, everyone was like, "Why are you coming here to learn Spanish? Why don't you go to Peru/Columbia/Ecuador? Chileans speak fast and with too much slang." And it's true, Chileans speak really fast, and with a ton of slang. And they don't enunciate very well. But, as I would tell everyone, it doesn't really bother me. I sort of like trying to strain my brain to understand and trying to learn the Chilean expression for things. It's a fun challenge for me. But yeah, it means that a lot of the time, I have no clue what people are talking about when they talk amongst each other.

But actually, since most of my Spanish speaking friends in Montreal are Chilean, and having spent so much time in Chile relative to other countries, is that some of the words I've learned for things are local only to Chile, and I don't even know. Until I use one of them with a non-Chilean and they either laugh at me or look at me dumbfounded. Sort of like what happens when I start speaking Quebecois French with a French person because it's what I'm most used to speaking and forget to "Internationalize". I still have so much to learn.

There are tons of words and expression Chileans use, but one phenomena that I find hilarious is the use of huevon. Now, the word seems to come from the word huevo, or egg, but don't ask me what the link is, because it's used generally by the population to mean asshole or jerk or schmuck, according to context. There's a Chilean movei that's in cinemas right now called El rey de los huevones - King of the huevones.

What's really funny, though, is that young men literally tack it on to the end of every sentence when speaking to each other. (As far as I can tell, they don't really use it when talking to women, and women don't use it amongst themselves.) In this context, it doesn't really have an insulting connotation. They even tack it onto the end of the very Chilean "Ya, po", which is an affirmative answer to someone's question, which then becomes "Ya, po, huevon...". And when a bunch of young, drunken Chilean men are sitting around at a barbeque, conversing rapidfire and barely enunciating anything, you get something that sounds to my ears like: "hfjghfjghfjgh, huevon, fhgjfhgjfhgfj, huevon. dfhgjdfhgdjfghjdhg, huevon. Etc." I find it quite entertaining.

Argentinians speak differently. Their Spanish has a different rhythm to it. They don't use the same slang, and they have a really distinctive accent that everyone in the rest of South America makes fun of. And they don't use tu when addressing someone in the second person singular, they use another pronoun, vos, which has it's own distinctive corresponding verbal conjugations, which I can understand, but I don't quite have the hang of yet.

On the 17 hour bus ride I'm taking tonight to Salta, I'll have lots of time to observe.