Dennis, a native of Colombia, grew up using the term la ñapa to describe a little something extra, such as an additional piece of bread added to your order gratis when you visit a bakery. His husband, who is from Louisiana, uses the term lagniappe to mean the same thing. Both derive ultimately from Quechua yapa, meaning “something added.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “La Ñapa, a Spanish Word for “A Little Extra””
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, how are you doing? This is Dennis from Indianapolis, Indiana.
Hey, Dennis, we’re doing great. What’s on your mind today?
I’m originally from Colombia, and we use a lot of mixed words from indigenous dialects.
So in Colombia, when we want to say that you get something extra, we say la ñapa.
And I was telling that to my husband, who is from Louisiana, and he said, well, you have the same word. We call it la ñap.
And I was like, wait a second. That sounds very similar. Those are indeed the same words.
So spell that for us in Spanish.
So in Spanish will be la, which means la. So it’s L-A.
And the word itself is Enya, Enya, Enya, P-E-A, Nyapa.
And then in Louisiana and in American English, Lanyap is L-A-G-N-I-A-P-P-E, right?
Yes, that’s correct.
And how does that work in Colombia? You go into a store, you buy something, and how does Lanyapa happen?
So let’s say you go to the bakery and you get like 10 pieces of bread and you say, hey, since I got all this bread, why don’t you give me la ñapa?
So they will give you like an extra piece of bread.
Yeah, so this goes back, like you said, to an indigenous language, to Quechua, which is still widely spoken throughout South America, one of the largest indigenous languages with a bunch of dialects.
And it entered Spanish not long after the Spaniards arrived in the New World. And it comes from a word, yapa, spelled Y-A-P-A, to help or to increase.
And there are various verbs and noun forms of that. And it entered Spanish, like I said, as la ñapa.
But when it arrived in Louisiana, it entered this linguistic melange as a single word. So instead of being la ñapa, it arrived as one word.
And then it took on the French spelling since French was such a dominant language in Louisiana. And then New Orleans and all the Creole heritage there.
So it really kind of reflects the Spanish heritage of that part. Because remember, Spain had influence and control over Louisiana and New Orleans for a while too.
Mark Twain in his book Life on the Mississippi calls it the equivalent to the 13th Roland and Baker’s Dozen, just like you were talking about in Colombia.
But what’s really interesting to me is that this Quechua word doesn’t exist only in Colombia and in American English. It also exists throughout the Spanish-speaking parts of South America.
It is everywhere, and it’s kind of altered and changed a bit, but you will find it in pretty much every country in South America.
This one word is, so the lanyard is just one finger out of the 10 fingers of yapa. So in Chile, and Peru, and Bolivia, and Argentina, and Ecuador, and Venezuela, and even in Puerto Rico and Cuba and all these other places, it’s there.
And it always means something like give me a little extra or give me more of the same.
That’s so cool. Wow.
Isn’t it? I’m trying to imagine that moment when your husband, who’s from Louisiana, and you both figured out it was the same thing.
Yeah, I was like, wait a second. So this little word over 500 years made this path into all these languages, and people still use it today.
Isn’t that incredible?
It’s amazing.
Wow.
Dennis, thank you so much for your call.
All right.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye, Dennis.
Is that a theory? Nyapa is a word used in the Virgin Islands though less so now. The pronunciation seems West African and is said that way. Context: If rice is cooked, someone might request the leftover from the pot, even the slightly burnt rice, as the nyapa. I understand it is also used in Jamaica. I encountered it in Cartagena and was shocked, which also suggests a West African origin. My two cents…
The “nya” seems very West African.
Nyam – to eat quickly.
Nyampi or Yampi – the mucus that might be in the corner of your eye when you awaken.
Fortunately, we have hundreds of years of linguistic evidence to show that those words are unrelated.
First, superficial short-word similarities are incredibly common across languages. They may give you a starting point for investigation, but such a similarity is never decisive.
Second, if you look at the reference works, you’ll see that they all connect the Caribbean (including the Virgin Islands) “nyapa” to the Spanish “ñapa.” The connection is confirmed by appearing in other forms in other Caribbean islands that more resemble the original Spanish. For example, the form in Trinidad and Tobago is “lanyap,” and in Papiamentu it is also sometimes “yapa” or “yapay,” which came from a different shortening of “ñapa” as “’llapa.” When we see these variants on a continuation of change in both their forms and their usage in the printed record, then we know we’re onto a connection.
Third, we have good information on the other word, “nyam,” and you can see in the reference works from the variety of spellings that the superficial similarity is only really for the short form. The longer spelling variants “ninyam,” ” nynyam,” and “yamyam” are more similar to the original Kikongo, Bantu, and other Niger-Congo languages. Again, we cluster these variants together and in their overall contexts in the citations to see they are related.
Fourth, “ñapa” and “lagniappe” are about any kind of extra, not just food, whereas “nyam” is only about food. Also, the idea of the prized bit of extra-cooked rice being the “nyapa” is accurate, but elsewhere “nyapa” is much more diverse in its meaning for any kind of extra. So “nyapa” is ultimately from “la ñapa,” not “nyam” or variants.
The prevailing theory about the African “nyam” is that it’s imitative of the sound we make when eating, especially when we are trying to encourage a child to eat—literally the same sound where we get “yum-yum” in English. Words for this imitative sound exist in 16 languages that we know of, and probably many more.
“Nyampi” and “yampi” are also a red herring.
The reference works consulted were: Richard Allsopp’s “Dictionary of Caribbean English,” Frederic Cassidy and R.B. Le Page’s “Dictionary of Jamaican English,” Cassidy’s “Jamaica Talk,” Antoine Maduro’s “Procedencia Di Palabranan Papiamentu I, Otro Anotacionnan II (Letter N te ZJ),” and Lisa Winer’s “Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad & Tobago”