The rain in Spain...

When we first arrived in Bilbao in October of 1997, it was after a very long
night of flying and day of going through all the immigration channels in Madrid.
The visit to the police station, complete with the guardia civil officer armed
with a machine-gun and the finger-printing of all six of us, was rather
daunting. But the weather was fair, that is, until we drove into the mountains
of the Basque Country. As we soon learned from the meteorologist on ETV, the sun
can often be seen in every region of Spain, yet reserve his shyness for the
Basques. Indeed, the Costa Verde, or Green Coast, has its name for its lush
green mountains, and also from its year-round wet climate.

For this reason, it was no surprise that one of the first words we learned, not
from our language class although it was used there frequently enough, but from
meeting and talking with other folks from out apartment complex. The word that
was on everyone's lips during our first three years in Spain--until we left the
Basque Country--was Zirimiri, pronounced "Seedy-meedy". In English, we would
call it drizzle. We thought it was a typically Spanish word, and used it almost
daily like everyone else. But after we moved to Malaga on the southern,
Mediterranean coast and used the word, we got that look from people that we
often received when we spoke English. It turned out that it was a Basque word
from the Euskera language, and wasn't needed very much in the South anyway.

There, the weather was different. While the winter and springtime could have
their rainy periods, they were much more like downpours and would last for days,
but would then end. However, the region surrounding Sevilla has a drought season
from early June through the end of September during which time every green thing
that grows on the ground (without irrigation!) turns brown and crackly dry.
Temperatures also soar to 45 degrees C. It is no wonder that Northern Europe
winters along the southern coast of "sunny Spain", and even the Basques come
down for a bit of sun in the summertime.

Our play on the line that Henry Higgins made famous through his torment of Eliza
Dolittle went a little more like this: "The rain in Spain falls mainly in
Bilbao."


-Donna Hanchett

Languages of Spain

As you can probably guess, Spanish is the official language of Spain.  But one of the things that makes Spain interesting is the fact that even though Spanish (called castellano, or "Castilian" in Spain) is the predominant language and just about everyone in Spain speaks it, there are three other official languages, or co-official languages.  There are also a few others that are spoken by small amounts of people.  Asturleonese, Aragonese and Aranese (Occitan) are probably the most important of these, though no more than a couple thousand people, mostly in small towns and villages, speak them on a regular basis.

In the map to the right, you can see that purple represents areas where only Spanish is spoken, using different shades to represent different accents.  The darker purple in the north is where the strongest Castilian accent is spoken (considered the purest by Spanish speakers).  Out of the other languages, Galician (in blue), Basque (green) and Catalan (orange) are official languages in Spain.  In the parts of Spain where these languages are spoken, all the street signs are in both Spanish and the other language, and there are many options in public schools to be taught in them.

Both Galician (gallego in Spanish) and Catalan (catalán) are Romance languages, just like Spanish, which means they all come from Latin.  Galician is very similar to Portuguese, and Catalan is very close to French and Italian.  Basque (vasco, or euskera), however, is the only one that does not come from Latin, and is considered a linguistic isolate, meaning it is unrelated to any other language in the world.  It is also said to be one of the oldest languages in the world!  The speakers of these languages tend to be very proud to speak them, though most of them, especially in large cities, do also speak Spanish.