Author: Seán Silla

When I was living in Spain I often found myself in a recurrent peculiar situation: I was asked to translate from Spanish to Spanish. Loved it.

I was an almost random guy who, not being a native Spanish speaker, was often asked to explain and translate from a language into the same language….and (you might be scratching your head now) at times it was not easy at all.

Now, as I am sure you know Spanish language comes from Spain…but, there are more native speakers outside Spain than the ones in Spain…(I guess the conquistadores didn’t think about this back in the days).

The thing is that I am also a musician and I love world music, and being in Barcelona and not busking around would have been a pity, so I was soon playing with the Andinean band you see in the picture above. THAT BAND…hahah we were from many places, mostly Bolivia, Ecuador and Chile, and they had no problem communicating to each other, BUT…as soon as we finished some of our concerts people from the audience would speak to us and surprisingly the situations where they were not able to understand the Spanish spoken by the musicians were not uncommon, and I am not referring to the “lingo”, I am talking about structures and vocabulary.

SO…I was the only European there that could understand easily both variants…what a funny situation: they spoke Spanish but could not understand each other; Later on thinking about it I was amused by the fact that American Spanish sounds much more untouched and faithful to the “original” Spanish than the European Spanish…or is it?

Maybe some structures and adverbs, but what about the miriads of Quechua, Azteq, Mayan, Mapuche and Italian or English words widely and commonly used in the different American Variants of Spanish which anyway don’t seem to bother Central and South American Spanish spakers to understand each other? Though it seemed to be a limit in Spain…

My theory is now that languages have no borders, instead, borders have languages, people have languages, in some cases families have languages (e.g. in Italy Catalan is spoken by a few families left).

How did I end up speaking Italian, English, Spanish, Catalan, Indonesian, a bit of Portuguese and losing my French?

Good question. I was born in Italy in 1988, I am half American and I have always been an explorer, always looking for what I felt was my future and pursuing it.

I remember studying languages at school as an extremely boring and demotivating activity. Instead, learning them through direct communication was addictive, I literally couldn’t stop looking for new foreign friends, in my city and throughout the internet.

At 18 I was already living in Spain, actually in Catalonia. More precisely in Manresa, the deep heart of Catalonia, so I had to learn their language (Catalan), out of both respect and curiosity. I lived there for around 6 years.

Then I met my future wife on facebook and ended up in Indonesia for 5 more years.