Colombia: The purest Spanish - Google Arts & Culture (2024)

The arrival of Spanish in Colombia

The Spanish first arrived in the territory of present-day Colombia in 1509, as part of the expedition led by Alonso Ojeda beyond Lake Maracaibo. It was a region made up of small settlements, where more than 60 indigenous languages were spoken, including Wayuu and Quechua.

In 1525, the first colony was established—Santa Marta—and then in 1533, Cartagena de Indias was founded, which would become one of its most important ports. However, the ports both along the Atlantic and in the Caribbean remained isolated from the highlands of Colombia.

Nueva Granada, as Colombia was known at that time, became a Viceroyalty in 1718, leading to the founding of a university and other cultural centers. The continuous contact with the Castilian elite in Bogotá exerted a marked linguistic influence.

Cartagena de Indias, on the Caribbean coastline, was the most important port on the mainland. It was also one of the few authorized to receive African slaves, and so the majority of these arriving in South America disembarked there.

The African population of Cartagena grew to around 75% of the total population at one time, and although it later declined, it continued to be the dominant population. The result of the Afro-Colombian language was the Palenquero vernacular, one of four creole languages based on Spanish.

Indigenous Colombian (2022) by AlbertolopezphotoFundación Antonio de Nebrija

Caro and Cuervo Institute

Every year, many people travel to Bogotá specifically to study Spanish. Since its inauguration in 1942, countless people have studied at this Institute, including the renowned Master of Hispanic American Linguistics and Literature of the seminary, Andrés Bello.

The existence of this institute has gone some way to bolster the idea that in Colombia, and specifically inland, they speak the purest form of Spanish in Latin America, with the greatest correlation between pronunciation and the written form, and the "best" application of the grammatical rules.

Although true that most inland departments in Colombia have experienced minimal demographical mixing, conserving linguistic purity, some would indicate other cities where "better Spanish is spoken", appealing to linguistic nationalism.

Even so, Colombia is one of the most studied nations in Latin America from the point of view of dialectology. Between 1982 and 1983, the Caro and Cuervo Institute published a study in the Linguistic-Ethnographic Atlas of Colombia (ALEC).

In terms of the lexicon, there are not many words considered Colombian in themselves, but there are specific colloquial definitions given to different words, such as amarrado (mean), argolla (wedding ring), mamado (tired), and joto (small packet).