Andalusia: the same language is not the same language

My Spanish has an address. It was built over six years in Colombia, and it carries Bogotá in the vowels and the Caribbean coast in the shortcuts. I had never really tested it anywhere else.

Then I travelled through Andalusia, and the test happened in the first café. Nobody failed to understand me — they understood me perfectly. But every sentence I said announced where I had learned it, and every sentence they said arrived faster than I expected.

The first adjustment was vosotros. Latin America does not use it; Spain uses it constantly, and hearing a form you have never once needed is a strange feeling. You understand it long before you can produce it.

The second was vocabulary. "Listo" became "vale". A beer became "una caña". Meeting a friend became "quedar", a verb I had barely used in six years.

The third was sound. Andalusian Spanish drops consonants at the ends of words in a way Bogotá never does, and adds a c and z my ear kept filing as an error for the first few days. Granada and Seville did not sound like each other either.

None of it was a problem. It was information. There is no neutral Spanish, only somebody's Spanish, and travelling is how you find out which one you are carrying.

I still speak Colombian. I teach both now, and I say out loud which is which — students deserve to know the passport they are handed already has a stamp in it.