Reading the wild: fast speech and chat shorthand

Real Spanish shortens words in speech and in chat, and Spain and Latin America each have their own slang. Learn it to understand it; keep the neutral standard yourself, and never use any of it in an exam.

• Voy pa' casa. - I'm off home. (speech: pa' is para)
• No vengo xq trabajo. - I'm not coming because I'm working. (chat: xq is porque)

Informal Spanish at a glance

The forms you will meet most, with the standard word each one stands for:

Register is a scale, not a switch. The same greeting, from friends in Spain to a stranger:

Fast speech: what the mouth drops

Relaxed Spanish swallows sounds the spelling keeps. You hear these more than you read them:

Pa' is heard all over the Spanish-speaking world. The lost d of -ado (cansao) is strongest in Spain and the Caribbean; Mexico keeps the d far more. In Andalusia, the Canaries, the Caribbean and much of coastal Latin America a final s often fades to a breath or disappears, so los dos can sound like "lo do".

Chat and texting shorthand

Chat spelling comes from the keyboard, not the accent, so it is much the same from Madrid to Mexico City. Vowels go, and signs stand in for sounds:

The x is the multiplication sign, which Spanish reads as por (dos por tres, two times three); the 2 in salu2 is dos. Laughter is jaja, because the j sounds like an English h. A real message, and what it says:

• nos vemos el finde, xfa no llegues tarde - See you at the weekend, please don't be late.
• Nos vemos el fin de semana. Por favor, no llegues tarde. - the same in standard Spanish.