The reality for me is that knowing two languages has opened up new worlds for me in terms of human interaction, cultural awareness, vast business opportunities, and just an expanded way of thinking.
A few years back, it seemed highly improbable that cable channels would modify their lineup in order to offer their content dubbed rather than subtitled. From some point in the late ‘90s until quite recently, people enjoyed series and movies in their original language, making it possible to appreciate the “natural version” of an episode […]
Today, the Spanish speaking population reaches over 500 million people around the world. Additionally, Latin America has become in a rapidly growing market with much development and growth potential. Without a doubt, it has become a major market to introduce, and offer to services and products. However, when doing so we must acknowledge the fact […]
To celebrate the Sixth International Conference on the Spanish Language, which took place last week in Panama, the Spanish newspaper El País had writers from the twenty Spanish-speaking countries (as well as the United States) each choose one word that best represents their regional variety of the language. The result of the survey is an […]
The director of the Cervantes Institute (In Spanish, Instituto Cervantes), Victor García de la Concha, announced last week that the organization is in the process of increasing collaboration with different Ibero-American cultural centers. This initiative had already been announced in previous press releases from the institution, but now is when the fruits of this collaboration will […]
Three hundred years ago in Madrid, at the house of Don Juan Manuel Fernández Pacheco, the Marquis of Villena, a group of eight determined men met in order to attempt the feat of creating a dictionary of the Spanish language, founding an academy “to be composed of honorable individuals capable of examining and discerning the […]
In a previous post (Derby or Clásico?), we looked at some of the soccer terms which, by virtue of the incessant flow of Latin American players to Spain, the European media and fans ended up adopting. In particular, we highlighted the increasingly widespread use in the Iberian Peninsula of the term clásico to designate those […]
“The Spanish language has to undergo massive changes in preparation for the future without borders,” warned Gabriel García Márquez in the Congress of Zacatecas 1997. This declaration from the Colombian writer was shown to be prophetic as a little more than a decade after this Congress, Spanish was declared the second most spoken language in […]
“Seseo” consists of pronouncing the letters “c” (before “e” and “i”) and “z” with the sound normally associated with the letter “s”. If someone speaks with seseo, they would say “serésa” for “cereza” (cherry), “sierto” for “cierto” (true), and “sapáto” for “zapato” (shoe). Seseo is used generally throughout Latin America and in the Caray Islands […]
In this special time of year, I would like to interrupt our MultiTerm classes in order to talk about the different ways in which Christmas is celebrated in different parts of the world. While the objective of the celebration may be the same, in every country different traditions are adopted. In Argentina, children write letters […]