Spanish from Everywhere: When Spain and Latin America Share a Server

Pocket edition. This is a shorter version of a longer article; you can read the full edition when you have more time.

Log in to a Spanish-speaking Minecraft server and you're somewhere strange and lovely: in the same chat there are people from Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru. They all speak Spanish, and yet each speaks their own. "Ordenador" and "computadora" for computer. "Chaval", "güey", "pibe", "parcero" for mate. One language spread across twenty ways of saying the same thing.

The interesting part is what happens after the first frictions. At first there are jokes about accents, misunderstandings, the odd spat of "that's not how you say it". But if the community holds together, something happens: people adjust. You start using words that weren't yours, you understand idioms you didn't know, you tone down what you know sounds odd to the other person. Linguists call it communication accommodation: when we like each other, we bring our way of speaking closer to the other person's almost without noticing.

And so, without anyone planning it, a Spanish-speaking server manufactures a Spanish that belongs to no country: a mixture made of all of them, with words borrowed from every accent. It isn't the Spanish of Spain or of Mexico. It's the server's.

That a teenager from Seville and one from Bogotá should end up speaking alike from playing together so much is no small thing. It's what a language does when it truly unites: it doesn't erase where you come from, but it gives you a piece of everyone else.