Piña

Sure, piña means pineapple in Costa Rica, but it has a very different use as well. If you go to some rural fiestas in Costa Rica you can almost always buy tamales. They'll come in pairs, the two tamales wrapped together with twine. This is una piña de tamales.

I learned this one the hard way. I was at some fiestas and ordered a tamal. The server asked me if I wanted a "piña". After giving her my best look of disbelief I repeated that I wanted un tamal. After realizing why I was confused, she explained to me that tamales are usually served in piñas, or pairs of tamales.

Man, did I feel zampaguavas!

Consonant Assimilation

This linguistic phenomenon is not limited to Spanish, and certainly not to Costa Rica, but it nonetheless rears its ugly head in interesting ways in Costa Rica. To catch you up to speed, there are several cases in Spanish when consonants change their sounds based on the letter that follows. (We're not just talking about letters, but also phonemes, but I'll just call them letters for the sake of simplicity.) Consider the following examples:

The word 'rasgo' means physical characteristic or trait. The 's', which is normally an unvoiced sibilant, becomes a voiced sibilant like the 'z' in the English word 'zoo' because the 'g' that follows is a voiced consonant. This is consonant assimilation.

Another common example of consonant assimilation is the assimilation of 'n', an alveolar nasal consonant, to an 'm', a bilabial nasal consonant. In the noun phrase 'un barco' (a boat) the 'n', which is normally formed by pressing your tongue against your alveolar ridge just behind your upper front teeth, becomes a bilabial 'm' because the consonant the follows ('b') is also bilabial.

Anyway, I was prompted to think of this consonant assimilation when I came across a sign outside of the movie theater in Ciudad Quesada de San Carlos. The sign read 'Niños del Honbre', which according to the proper spelling of the words would be 'Niños del Hombre'. This was not the first time I had seen this misspelling, but it was perhaps the third time, and was what compelled me to consider it something more than a typo (or a 'write-o' or a 'placing letters on the sign outside of a movie theater...-o'). I can only explain it as a hypercorrection certain native speakers employ when they hear an 'm' but think they're supposed to write an 'n'. In Spanish you will always write 'un barco', even though there's an 'm' sound. On the other hand, within single words, you can NEVER have an 'n' before a 'b' or a 'p'. It's a rule. (We also have this rule in English; e.g., incoherent, but then imperfection.) So, when the 'n' is separated from the 'b' or 'p' by a word break, then it remains an 'n', but within the same word as a 'b' or a 'p', it simply can't be a written 'n'. My conjecture is that whichever case rings truer in the mind of a less-than-perfect speller is the one that is applied to the other case. It makes perfect sense to me that a Spanish speaker would sooner misspell 'hombre' than he would 'un', the latter of which is as essential to Spanish as 'a' or 'an' is to English. If this is true, then the misspelling of 'hombre' should be seen as a hypercorrection of the 'n' remaining an 'n' in the case of 'un barco' where it is pronounced like an 'm'.

In case you want another case of consonant assimilation in Spanish, here it is:

In the word 'banco' the 'n' takes on the sound of the 'ng' in the English word 'gong'. This happens because the 'n' will always assimilate to a velar 'c', 'k', or 'g' by becoming a velar 'ng'.

Pura Vida

Inside-Out

In rural Costa Rica the words 'inside' and 'outside' provide just one example of a set of vague directional references that locals will employ to confuse the hell out of you.

Adentro, to a Costa Rican living in a rural area, is a directional reference meaning "further into the country (boondocks)".

Afuera, as you may expect, means "toward the city". ("Cities" in Costa Rica are often of quite modest size.)

When city folk comes to the Costa Rican countryside, they often get confused by these references. I was witness to a conversation a Costa Rican had with a city-dwelling American when this issue caused major confusion. The rural Costa Rican asked the American (U.S.) "do you like living afuera"? The American then went on to explaining that, no, he prefers the city. The Costa Rican stopped listening at some point (as he normally does) and ended the conversation thinking that the guy actually preferred living in a rural setting. When I brought this up later on, he became defensive, assuring me that the guy didn't like living "afuera".

If you've ever tried confrontation with a Costa Rican, you'll know that it's a futile endeavor. The culture has a high level of avoidance and a distaste for 'necios' who challenge other people. As a result, I didn't try convincing this guy of the cultural divide that the conversation exemplified.

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Other confusing directional references include arriba and abajo. the rural Costa Rican has a surprisingly detailed picture of his area's topography in his head. He'll tell you, "voy pa' bajo", which means nothing to a city slicker. What he'll probably tell you, though, if you care to ask the right questions, is that the town that neighbors him to the south is at about 20 vertical meters below his own. I always wonder: "Couldn't he just tell me the name of the town"?!!? This wondering often gets you nowhere.

Also, Costa Ricans offer gestures to replace descriptive directional cues. Costa Ricans will point at things, whether near or far, with their lips. They press them together and stick them out, as if to make a duckbill, and nod their head in a slight upward motion in the indicated direction.

***Please note that this lip pointing is also a popular way for a Costa Rican man to point out an attractive woman to another dude***

Voy pa' Chepe

Mexico is well known for the nicknames it has for specific given names. Francisco can be either "Paco" or "Pancho". Ignacio you can call "Nacho" (even to his face). José can be "Pepe", but in Costa Rica, he's "Chepe". (Sometimes even Josué will become Chepe.)

As you may already know, Costa Rica's capital is San José. Even the capital de la patria cannot avoid this playful tico nomenclature. Costa Ricans outside of San José will often refer to San José as "Chepe", especially when they're making a trip to the city. (It seems that the farther you get from San José, the more often it's called "Chepe".)

"Voy pa' Chepe" is all I ever needed to say when I was leaving town.

In the Campo

The word 'campo' most people learn as a word meaning 'countryside'. This meaning is still valid in Costa Rica, but perhaps a more common usage, even in "el campo" itself, employs the word as a synonym for 'space'.

For example, if someone is trying to squeeze through a small space around another person, she'll say "deme campo por favor".

The first time I heard someone asking me for some 'campo', I didn't know what to make of it. (I was either too slow to pick up on contextual clues, or I was just too caught up in the new language to function as a normal human being.) I ended up getting out of the way, but it was about a minute later when I fully understood that the person was not only asking for a little space, but that campo actually means 'space'. A real epiphany, I know.

¡Dame campo o dame la muerte! Sounds like a country song.

Pura Vida,

Thomas

¡Diay!

This word, 'diay', is used quite frequently in Costa Rican Spanish in a number of different situations. Most notably, 'diay' is used for what in English would be something like "wtf?" (I prefer not to spell that out for you.)

For example, if I ask someone if he went to his AA meeting last night, to which he responded "no", I would say "diay"? (Just in case you didn't know, punctuation goes outside of quotation marks in written Spanish.) In one simple word I can express the following sentence: "I can't believe you didn't go to your AA meeting, you really should've gone, and you should be ashamed of yourself."

What other word can say so much?

You can also use 'diay' as filler before starting something you're gonna say.

The Double Plural

In rural areas of Costa Rica you'll sometimes hear double plurals. The most common one would be for parents, popularly referred to as 'papases.' To make 'papá' plural to mean parents you really only need to add a single 's' at the end. Many Ticos, however, think of the plural 'papás' as the word for a single set of parents. When they're talking about a group of parents, though, they'll say 'papases'.

It may seem weird, but there's actually some decent reason behind it. Plus, it sounds kind of cool. I dig it.

If you want to read more extensive articles on rural Costa Rican Spanish, go to the Costa Rican Spanish articles on my website. If you're into the linguistic aspects of Costa Rican language, I recommend the two with the title "Not the King's Spanish". There are also some lighter reads as well.

Rapu Davi ;)