Travel guide 10: Málaga, Sun and Dialect

In spite of the variants used by speakers of Andalusian Spanish, this dialect is easily recognisable because of its peculiar pronunciation and intonation. As the prologue to this guide explains, this is neither good nor bad; Andalusian speech is just different from Castilian, but neither is better. 

MÁLAGA, SUN AND DIALECT offers a glossary collecting popular words and idioms that characterise Málaga’s speech because they are too specific or they have acquired a meaning different from the one they have in Castilian Spanish. It is an original idea for a tourist guide, published to make language understanding easier for foreign visitors who do not know the language and for Spanish speakers who are not acquainted with this dialect, thus eliminating linguistic barriers to communication, which sometimes give rise to unfortunate misunderstandings.

The expressions collected can have various origins: they can be archaisms that have fallen into disuse in the rest of the Iberian Peninsula, like "aterminarse" (to dare); words introduced by villagers from León or Aragón in times of the Reconquest, such as "farfolla" (filler); expressions coming from Arabic, like "jamacuco" (sudden worsening of health) or "arramblar" (to greedily take everything you find in a place); gypsy words, such as "parné" (money); and rhythmic autochthonous colloquial expressions from Málaga and Andalusia, such as "mantamojá" (slow or faint-hearted person) or "puchindanga" (party, merrymaking).

The guide is 36-page long, and it includes colour illustrations. Apart from the glossary, it has a brief introduction to Andalusian phonetics, a supplement to make Málaga’s speech even easier to understand. 

MÁLAGA, SUN AND DIALECT compiles words and idioms from A to Z. Some of these expressions are very, very old, preserved in popular, especially rural, speech. In sum, this guide prsents a small but significant sample of Málaga’s rich vocabulary