California Language

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette in San Diego.

And I’m Grant Barrett in San Francisco.

San Francisco! Now that has a nice ring to it, Grant.

Very nice, very nice. Why don’t you catch everybody up on what you’ve been doing this summer?

I moved 3,000 miles across the country from New York City to San Francisco.

Yes! Yes!

We’re still not in the same city, I know. I would love to be sitting next to you, dear.

But, you know, there’s some language at the bottom of this.

You know that my other job is editorial director of wordnic.com, right?

That’s right.

It’s a new online dictionary that I’m involved with, and all of our team is moving here.

Some of us from Chicago, some of us from New York.

There’s a couple of guys who are already out here.

So we can all be together in one place, and it’s fantastic.

It’s wonderful.

And, of course, I’ve had my ear to the ground for California-specific language things,

Or at least things that are different here than they are in New York City.

Of course.

There’s tons of stuff.

Yeah, what are you hearing?

There are a lot of Pacific Islanders out here.

So there’s Tongans and Filipinos.

And so I’m hearing new languages that I just really never encountered in the stores or on the streets in New York City.

And that’s, you know, you think of New York City, the whole world is there.

It is.

I don’t hear Tagalog spoken, you know, every day like I could hear.

Oh, so you’re lingering at the grocery and cycling up to people at the bank.

That’s nice.

And, you know, the other thing is the Spanish here tends to be very Mexican, whereas in New York City it’s very Puerto Rican and Dominican, you know.

Yeah.

And that’s different. Besides the language being different, it means that the taquerias here are outstanding.

Yoo-hoo!

Better Mexican food all the way around, which just has nothing to do with the language. I’m just saying, yum.

And I had one of these weird experiences where the other thing that I’m noticing here is that the history of Spanish is so deep and so embedded into California.

And we’ve talked about this a couple times in the program, that some of these Spanish place names and some of these family names have had a chance to become thoroughly Anglicized, right?

Right.

And so I went with my father-in-law and some other family members and my wife and my son to a restaurant in Pescadero.

It was fantastic.

And it’s owned by a family who spells their name D-U-A-R-T-E-S.

But it is not pronounced Duartes.

It’s not?

It’s pronounced Duarts.

Oh, how interesting.

Because they’ve been here so long that the family’s completely lost, like, that Spanish pronunciation of the name.

It’s now just Duarte and not Duartes.

In any case, so I’m having a really great time listening to the language out here,

Just learning how to say the place names, which aren’t always like you’d think, of course.

And we’ve talked about that on the program, and we’ll talk about it again.

It’s wonderful to be in California.

Well, welcome, Grant.

We’re delighted to have you here.

And if you’d like to talk about language, any aspect of it whatsoever, call us at 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

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