Upon arriving here in Uruguay, I felt somewhat confident in a few areas of language: greetings, introducing myself and my family, some small talk, the alphabet, numbers and a small vocabulary of verbs and nouns…or so I thought…
I quickly found out that in addition to the expected pronunciation difference, influenced by the dialect from Spain (i.e. “v” sounds like “b”…vamos is pronounced bamos), there are other differences that make a big difference in both Argentina and Uruguay.
The first in the pronunciation of “y”. In school, we are taught that this sounds like it does in English “y”. In Argentina and Uruguay, it is pronounced “sh”. So, instead of “yo” it is “sho” and it is not a hard “o” like mow, it is a soft “o” pronounced like “au”. So it would sound like “shau”.
The second is the pronunciation of “ll”. In school, we are taught that this sounds like “y”. In Argentina and Uruguay, it is pronounced “dg” (think of the word judge). So instead of “llamo” it is “dgamo”.
Therefore, to introduce myself instead of saying “yo me llamo”, it sounds like “shau me dgamo”. That changes a lot and definitely makes some words very hard to understand. Estroy aprendiendo. Esta bien!
Posted on October 4th, 2007 by katiejocannon
Filed under: Argentina, Language, Travel, Uruguay
I think it sounds like you are ready to get down. djammo.
Greta didn’t teach us about the local dialect of Uruguay when we took spanish class last fall… not that I would have remembered it anyway! I’m inspired to look for another Community Edu spanish class to take this fall. By the time we get there, you’ll be fluent! Keep the spanish lessons coming!
Sounds like Greek to me………S.
Zach and I have a lot of work to do. We start lessons again on Oct. 15th. His teacher is from Chile, so her dialect is the same, I think.