Spanish Informal Register: Slang, Texting and Fillers

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.

Fillers: o sea, en plan, pues

Spoken Spanish is held together by small words that mean little alone and carry the rhythm. These are the ones you will hear on a loop:

Four exclamations that carry the tone of a whole sentence:

• ¡Madre mía! - Good grief!
• ¡Anda! - No way! (Spain)
• ¡Vaya! - Wow! or Oh dear!, depending on the voice.
• ¡Uf! - Phew!

Spain slang and its Latin American cousins

Everything in the first table is Spain. A Mexican or an Argentine understands much of it from films and series, but says something else.

The same four ideas across the map:

Who gets tío? Only friends. The same woman greets three people three ways:

123

1. 1¿Qué pasa, tío?
2. 2Buenos días, señora.
3. 3Hola a todos.

To her friend: ¿Qué pasa, tío? (What's up, mate?). To the older woman: Buenos días, señora (Good morning, madam). To the family: Hola a todos (Hi, everyone). Tío is for friends only.

Minced oaths: jo and jolín

Spain swears cheerfully, and you do not need any of it. You do need the polite stand-ins, which dodge a stronger word the way English says "sugar" or "flip":

• ¡Jo, qué mala suerte! - Oh no, what bad luck!
• ¡Ostras, qué tarde es! - Blimey, look how late it is!

Mistakes English speakers make

What to do next

1. Watch a Spanish series with Spanish subtitles and spot five forms from the first table.
2. Do the sort and spot-the-error drills below.
3. Then the other end of the scale: register and formality, and the regional word map in Spain vs Latin America vocabulary.