Adriana from Miami, Florida, says she and her Cuban-American friends and family use the terms fulano, fulanito, and fulanito de tal as the Spanish equivalent of John Doe. These terms for “so and so” came into Spanish from Arabic fulan...
Olivia from Denver, Colorado, is musing about her use of the term good people, as in She’s good people. This phrase is what linguists call an extragrammatical idiom, meaning the phrase makes sense even though it’s not grammatically...
You may have a favorite word in English, but how about one from another language? Martha likes the Spanish term ojalá because it’s handy for expressing hopefulness, and has an interesting history, deriving from inshallah, Arabic for “God...
Marcie from Fort Worth, Texas, grew up in Chile speaking Spanish, but her 10-year-old daughter has trouble rolling her Rs. This difficulty or inability to trill one’s Rs is called rhotacism, and it’s not uncommon in Spanish-speaking...
A native English speaker who’s been studying Spanish for 11 years with her husband finds that learning a second language has an effect on her original tongue. She can’t spell as well as she used to, and sometimes finds herself reaching...
You might assume that the Welsh word plant means the same thing it does in English, but this word is a linguistic false friend. The Welsh word plentyn means “child,” and the word plant means “children.” Some false friends are...