You only need 26 questions to locate yourself on the Spanish world map
Did you know that perenquén, sargantana, tuqueque, machorro, charancaco or sugandilla are different ways to refer to a lizard? Or that there are those who do not say the frying pan, but the frying pan? The diversity of our language is a fact that becomes even more evident when answering each of the 26 questions that make up Spanish dialects , the web-app that has set out to guess where you're from by how you speak.
“The options that are proposed for each question are grammatical variants that are used in certain areas of the Spanish-speaking world. Thanks to some previous studies of linguistic geography (especially the dialect atlases of the 20th century), we know in which areas some of these structures are used and, depending on what the participants respond, the web-app places them in each of the Spanish-speaking countries”, Mónica Castillo Lluch, creator of this project together with Enrique Pato and Miriam Bouzouita, explains to Traveler.es. all three are professors of Hispanic linguistics at the universities of Lausanne, Montreal and Ghent, respectively.
Give examples so that the concept is well understood. “If you answer ‘It was in Bogotá where they met’, the web-app will believe that you are Spanish; if you answer 'It was in Bogotá that they met', it is known that it is the most frequent option in America, but also in Catalonia. Instead, 'They met was in Bogotá', is used in Colombia, Venezuela, Panama and Ecuador; and 'They met in Bogotá was', in part of the Dominican Republic ".
To gain precision integers, some of your questions are related to the lexicon which allows the web-app to 'geolocate' the place of origin of the speakers. “The app assigns a weight to each of the answers given (by means of points per linguistic zone) to offer the final result. In this prediction, certain exclusionary conditions are taken into account”, such as, for example, “if the speaker is vosea, she cannot be from Spain, although she can live in that country”, reflects Castillo.
And yes, with the current knowledge it is possible to 'guess' in many cases where a speaker comes from, but Castillo also recognizes that "There is much that we still don't know about the diffusion of these structures (especially in America), and that is why the web-app sometimes doesn't get it right".
And you, what do you call that animal?
For this reason, it is important that users reach the final questionnaire and indicate their place of origin, where they grew up and where they currently reside, since it allows “to discover much more about the extension of the grammatical variants under study”.
In addition, the data they collect will be published in different studies. "In some cases will serve to describe the variation in structures of which nothing is known until today: who says this water / this water?, what is the extension of he told me to come today and speaks ill of me?, do you prefer we are not going to recognize it or are we not going to recognize it?”, says Castillo.
"In other cases they will help to complete our knowledge of constructions already explored in part in the previous bibliography (Places in which forms are used plus nothing, I already said it, in front of me, leist areas or those in which the existential verb to have is not impersonal) . We can also find out what forms do young people prefer and how does the way of speaking of Spanish speakers who change their place of residence evolve, either by national or international migration”, he concludes.
And it is that Dialects of Spanish has two objectives: social and scientific. “Socially, we want Spanish speakers to assume that we all speak dialects of Spanish and that those dialects present grammatical contrasts. Regardless of what is considered normative, all these variants have their historical reason for being and their grammatical logic. Our dialects are a cultural heritage, which must be known and defended”. Thus, this web-app allows them to collect data to advance in the knowledge of dialectal and social variations and in the processes of grammatical change in Spanish worldwide.
From a scientific point of view, they are proving a new tool to obtain linguistic data. “It has the peculiarity of being very powerful quantitatively (in two weeks we exceeded 200,000 participants), but we know that it collects data in a very different way from how it has been collected until now (through direct surveys of informants)”.