Guide to Costa Rican Spanish

According to Hamel’s Bilingual Dictionary of Mexicanismos (Mexican Spanish) the word chingadera means trash or nonsense. During my youth when I was living and studying in México in the 1960s I became familiar with this term and most of its uses.

(1) Chingadera
Esta tienda vende puras chingaderas. This shop sells nothing but crap or trash.

Quita esa chingadera de allí. Get rid of that trash (figurative). The equivalent in Costa Rican Spanish. Quita esa basura or mierda de allí

No digas tantas chingaderas. Stop talking nonsense. Here you might hear Dejá de hablar tanta paja(B.S.) or mierda (crap).

(2) Chingar
In Mexico the verb chingar usually means to bother (molestar), to harm (dañar), to make sacrifices (sacrificarse) or to screw someone (figuratively or literally), etc.

No me andes chingando – Stop fucking with me! Here you will probably here . ¡No jodás!

Eso me chinga mucho. That bothers me a lot.

Se chingó la fiesta The party got all screwed up. In Mexico they also say Se aguó la fiesta.

Me chingo trabajando día y noche – I work my butt off day and night. In Mexico they also say, Me deshuevo trabajando I bust my balls working. I have also heard, Me deslomo or me parto la espalda trabajando– I break my back working

(3) In Mexico Chingo means “a lot” .
Here it means nude (desnudo). Also in Costa Rica “Dormir a chanco chingo” means to sleep well. Getting back to Mexican Spanish.

Te quiero un chingo – I love you a lot. Here you might hear te quiero a montones or un montón.

Gasté un chingo de dinero. I spent a lot of money. In Costa Rican pachuco you can say Gasté un montón de plata. I have also heard Gasté un hueval de plata (sort of vulgar).

A rose by any other name may still smell as sweet, but if the name is said with an accent, there are unexpected complexities that are being unraveled now by scientists. And understanding these complexities may be of value to foreigners living in a country where the principal language is not their own.

Expats may notice that as they talk to Costa Ricans their body language and accent changes.

That is not unusual, according to a recent article in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. It said that imitating someone who speaks with a regional or foreign accent may actually improve understanding.

“If people are talking to each other, they tend to sort of move their speech toward each other,” said Patti Adank, of the University of Manchester, who cowrote the study. People don’t only do this with speech, she says. “People have a tendency to imitate each other in body posture, for instance in the way they cross their arms.” She and her colleagues devised an experiment to test the effect of imitating and accent on subsequent comprehension of sentences spoken in that accent.

The experiment used Dutch students who were challenged with an unfamiliar Dutch dialect. People who had imitated the accent did much better at understanding the sentences than others, according to the results.

“When listening to someone who has a really strong accent, if you talked to them in their accent, you would understand better,” Ms. Adank said.

If someone puts on, say, a fake Southern accent when talking to a resident of the U.S. State of Georgia, the southerner might not think the
intention is friendly. But when a speaker’s brain subtly and unconsciously shifts the voice to sound more like the listener’s, it appears to be deploying a useful strategy, said the summary from the Association for Psychological Science.

In a more complex report, researchers at the University of Haifa in Israel said that more empathy one has for another, the lighter the accent
will be when speaking in a second language. That study was published in the International Journal of Bilingualism.

The research said that both personal and sociopolitical aspects have an influence on accent in speaking a second language, and that teachers giving instruction in languages as second languages, especially among minority groups, must relate to the social and political connection when teaching.

A study in Scotland using magnetic resonance imaging showed that the brain of Scots responded differently when they listened to speakers with Scottish accents than to speakers with American or British accents.

“The initial results suggest that such vocal samples somehow reflect group membership or social identity, so that ‘in-group’ voices are processed differently from the ‘out-group,’” said researcher Patricia Bestelmeyer, based on research at the University of Glasgow. The results suggests that people process words spoken with their own accent more quickly and effortlessly than other accents.

A University of Chicago study found that a foreign accent undermines a person’s credibility in ways that the speaker and the listener don’t consciously realize. Because an accent makes a person harder to understand, listeners are less likely to find what the person says as truthful, researchers found. The problem of credibility increases with the severity of the accent, the study determined.

As many bilingual individuals know, their abilities to speak two or more languages fluently is like hosting several persons within the same body.

One study shows that even infants born to bilingual mothers exhibit preferences for both languages because they heard both while in the womb.

Another study shows that bilingual speakers can focus better on tasks that are not related to communications. Psychologists theorize that the bilingual mind learns how to control disruptive influences like the second language better.

Those who speak more than one language frequently report that their entire body mannerisms change when they switch languages.

Then there is the Canadian study that found more evidence that speaking two languages can help delay the onset of Alzheimer’s symptoms by as much as five years.

Now comes a study from Harvard University that says that language may influence not only thoughts, but implicit preferences as well.

Bilingual individuals expressed different opinions of ethnic groups depending on which language was used to administer a test.

“Charlemagne is reputed to have said that to speak another language is to possess another soul,” said the Harvard paper’s co-author, Oludamini Ogunnaike, a Harvard graduate student, the university reported. “This study suggests that language is much more than a medium for expressing thoughts and feelings. Our work hints that language creates and shapes our thoughts and feelings as well.”

“Can we shift something as fundamental as what we like and dislike by changing the language in which our preferences are elicited?” asked co-author Mahzarin R. Banaji, a professor of social ethics at Harvard. “If the answer is yes, that gives more support to the idea that language is an important shaper of attitudes.”

According to an article prepared by Harvard:

Ogunnaike, Banaji, and Yarrow Dunham, now at the University of California, Merced, used the well-known Implicit Association Test, where participants rapidly categorize words that flash on a computer screen or are played through headphones. The test gives participants only a fraction of a second to categorize words, not enough to think about answers.

“The IAT bypasses a large part of conscious cognition and taps into something we’re not aware of and can’t easily control,” Banaji said.

The paper appears in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

The researchers administered the implicit association test in two settings: once in Morocco, with subjects who spoke Arabic and French, and again in the United States, with Latinos who spoke English and Spanish.

In Morocco, participants who took the test in Arabic showed greater preference for other Moroccans. When they took the test in French, that difference disappeared. Similarly, in the United States, participants who took the test in Spanish showed a greater preference for other Hispanics. But again, in English, that preference disappeared. The tests used first names that suggested the nationality of an individual.

The study results mean a lot more than quirks of the bilingual mind. They support the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis developed in the 1930s that says language influences thought and people who speak different languages think differently.

By the University of Chicago news service

A foreign accent undermines a person’s credibility in ways that the speaker and the listener don’t consciously realize, new research at the University of Chicago shows.

Because an accent makes a person harder to understand, listeners are less likely to find what the person says as truthful, researchers found. The problem of credibility increases with the severity of the accent.

“The results have important implications for how people perceive non-native speakers of a language, particularly as mobility increases in the modern world, leading millions of people to be non-native speakers of the language they use daily,” said Boaz Keysar, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and an expert on communication.

“Accent might reduce the credibility of non-native job seekers, eyewitnesses, reporters or people taking calls in foreign call centers,” said Shiri Lev-Ari, lead author of “Why Don’t We Believe Non-native Speakers? The Influence of Accent on Credibility,” written with Keysar and published in the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Levi-Ari is a post-doctoral researcher at the University whose work focuses on the interactions between native and non-native speakers.

To test the impact of accent on credibility, American participants were asked to judge the truthfulness of trivia statements by native or non-native speakers of English, such as, “A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can.”

Simple prejudice could affect ratings of truthfulness, so the researchers tried to minimize that effect by telling participants the information in the statements was prepared for the speakers, and was not based on the speakers’ own knowledge.

Despite knowing the speakers were reciting from a script, the participants judged as less truthful the statements coming from people with foreign accents. On a truthfulness scale prepared for the experiment, the participants gave native speakers a score of 7.5, people with mild accents a score of 6.95 and people with heavy accents 6.84.

“The accent makes it harder for people to understand what the non-native speaker is saying,” Keysar said. “They misattribute the difficulty of understanding the speech to the truthfulness of the statements.”

In a second experiment, researchers tested whether awareness reduces the impact of accent on perceived truthfulness. Researchers told participants that they were being tested to see if accents undermine credibility.

That experiment was conducted with identical recorded statements, but with different results. While participants rated statements with mild accent just as truthful as statements by native speakers, they rated heavily accented statements as less truthful, Lev-Ari said.

Accent is one of the factors that influences people’s perception of foreigners in a society, Keysar pointed out. But its insidious impact on credibility is something researchers had not previously known, he added.

Most people think English is Costa Rica’s second language, but surprisingly that is not the case. In Costa Rica the word pachuco refers to a person who has manners that are socially unacceptable and often uses shocking language when speaking. Pachuco is also a pejorative name given to certain colloquial words and expressions. Some consider pachuco and its pachuquísmos to be Costa Rica’s second language. There is a place on you tube where you can listen to a tico doing a humorous monologue by using an exaggerated form of pachuco titled “Nuestro segundo idioma el pachuco” (“Our second language pachuco”). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU8A0VYZ_OE

Below are the English translations of some of the words and expressions from this link.

Alzar un culo – to pick up a girl
Avisparse – to get smart or be alert
Baldazo – a rain storm
Carne de tavo – a person who is in jail
Cascabel – a rattle snake or mean woman.
Chante – a house. Choza and cuna are synonyms in pachucho
Compinches –friends or buddies
Comprarse una bronca – look for or get into trouble
Coronar la misión – to have sex
Creerse la última chupadita del mango – to think you are hot stuff. Other ways to say the same thing are: Creerse gran cosa, creerse la última Coca Cola en el desierto, creerse la gran caca (think you are big shit) or creerse muy sabroso.
Cuatro Plumas – Cacique the national liquor of Costa Rica. It is called cuatro plumas in tico slang (four feathers) because the Indian on the label has four feathers on his head.
Dar color – to embarrass
Darle pelón – to flirt with someone. It is more common to use dar pelota.
Dejar buey – to make someone feel stupid
Dejar como un domingo en la Sabana..solo pelotas – to get beaten up physically. To leave someone like the Sabana Park on a Sunday full of soccer balls (bumps)
Dejarle a uno más cruzado que el saco de Gardel – to get very high on drugs
Detrás de lopa – behind the eight ball. The expression is “Detrás del palo” but pachucos often reverse the syllables of words, thus lopa instead of palo
Echar el ruco – pick up girl. Ruco is slang for horse. Echar el caballo or echar los perros is also used here.
En menos que canta un gallo – fast or in a jiffy. I have also heard, “En menos que el presidente hace mil promesas.” In less time than it takes the president to make 1000 promises.
Enjacharle a alguien – make a face at someone. Jacha is slang for face in Costa Rica. Hacerle una cara a alguien is the correct way to say it.
Enroscarse – to sleep. Rulearse is also used in Costa Rica to mean the same thing.
Espomosita – beer (foamy). Una friá or un águlia is also used here.
Estaca – a tight-fisted person.
Estar como agua para chocolate – to be boiling mad
Estar como Bagaces de Liberia – to be lazy
Friquear – to freaked out
Gallada – bunch of guys
Gargantillas – a bunch of women
Guatazo – a quick bath
Hacerle daño – to have sex
Hacerse el Soviético – a variation of “Hacerse el Ruso” or to play dumb. Hacerse el maje is more common.
Harinón – a lot of money. Harina is more common for money. Un hueval de plata is also used.
Jema – means maje but backwards. Remember pachuchos like to reverse syllables.
La clase Burger King – word play on Burgesia (middle class or bourgeoisie).
La manteca – wife
La pulpe – pulpería or small corner grocery store
Lance – the opportunity to seduce a woman
Lolo – stupid
Manda güevo que – I don’t believe it or it is incredible. For example: Manda huevo güevo que BIll Smith no hable inglés. It is impossible that Bill doesn’t speak English.
Masticar – speak a language. It literally means to chew or masticate.
Muy kilometrado- a person who is over the hill. To have a lot of millage in this case kilometers.
Nido – slang for house. It literally means “nest.” Choza and chante are synonyms
Oler a quemado – sounds boring
Palmar – to kill
Parecer una bolsa de de leche – A woman who has no waist. She looks like a “bag” of milk.
Pelliscado – alert or smart. Vivo is a synonym.
Pichel – a person’s face. Cara or rostro are the correct words for face
Ponerse de jetas – to say stupid remarks
Ponerse en Venus – get high on drugs or literally go to the planet Venus
Raspar las ollas – to eat (literally to scrape the bowl)
Robar pasto – steal a girl from another guy
Ruedas – car (literally wheels)
Se le mete la guata – a version of se le mete el agua which means to go crazy. Guata is pachuco for water instead of agua
Ser como el cuchillo de Tarzán – to be as sharp as Tarzan’s knife or to be hungry
Ser todo orejas – to be all ears
Sobre – bed Cama or lecho are the correct words for bed. Lecho is used this way. El hombre está en el lecho de la muerte. The guy is on his death bed.
Solo good – a version of Solo bueno which means “Things are only good or only good things are happening”
Soltar el violín – to inspire pity
Tirar al baúl de los recuerdos – to get rid of a girlfriend in this case
Tirar la toalla – to give up or “throw in the towel.”
Tucos – legs
Volverse camote – to go crazy
Yodito – slang for coffee in Costa Rica