Notes about grammar

Philosophy of grammar

There are two truths in linguistics that are in tension.  The first is that all humans use language to communicate and we can use any language we learn to express ourselves.  In this sense, all languages are more or less the same.  The second is that every language is part of a culture or cultures and when we learn to communicate in a new language we are also learning a new culture.  Even grammar is part of a cultural expression and the language we speak influences the world view of the speakers.  So in that sense, every language is extremely important and unique.  When linguistics worry about language extinction, we worry about the loss of other ways of experiencing the world and understanding reality, among other important concepts that are encoded in different languages.

This book is aimed at advanced intermediate students of Spanish who are mostly, but not exclusively, learning a second language.  For those of you who are heritage speakers of Spanish or native speakers, you may already have an intuitive understanding of what is being described here.  This tension is one of the drivers of Spanglish, for example.  Sometimes the best word or phrase to describe what is in your mind is not only in one language.

If you are a second language learner, this idea might be new.  But it will come up time and again in this book and it has already come up in your Spanish language learning journey.  For example, we have not included a review of ser and estar in this book because in our experience, the students who have reached the level of proficiency needed for the courses that can be taught with this book, those students are pretty good at the ser/estar distinction.  However, when you think back to learning this distinction, you probably remember it was hard.  And why was it hard?  Because you had to take one word in English and learn two words to express the same or similar concept in Spanish.  You had to learn a different way of thinking about reality.  This will come up again and again in grammatical topics in this book.  Just remember that as you’re doing the work of learning new grammatical structures, or perfecting ones that are still challenging, you’re learning about a different culture.  You are learning a different way of thinking and experiencing the world.

Vos and vosotros

There are two regionally used pronouns that will come up in this text quite often: vos and vosotros.  As you will learn, vos is an alternative to tú that is used in large parts of Latin America.  It’s very difficult to say exactly how many vos users there are in the Spanish speaking world.  However, probably at least 40% of Latin Americans use vos at least some of the time. In 2020 that was approximately 160 million people. Source.  Vosotros is used in the majority of Spain.  It is not used in the Canary Islands and there are parts of Andalucía in which it is not used either.  At the writing of this book at least 40 million Spanish speakers use this form of address.

Since these are forms that are used by millions of Spanish speakers, but not the majority in either case, both forms will be presented in verb conjugation charts with the following layout:

Tú and vos often share a form but when they have different forms, that will be indicated for you.

However, you, the learner, are not expected to reproduce either conjugation, neither vos nor vosotros, in practice activities.