At the moment, I am in a larger coffee house, one owned by an American—I am told. It is more attuned to an international clientele. I can see that in the subtlety of practices. Here, when people come in and out they do not say hello or goodbye.
Is that because it is large or because it is American / International. I do not know, but the combination leads to this lack of greeting and leave taking similar to Starbucks. There you simply do not expect people to enter and say hello or to say bye when they leave.
Trying to understand this exercises my professional mind—though I am retired. I have heard lectures and read articles about such things in a field called the ethnography of speaking, related to socio linguistics and anthropological linguistics more generally. For me, the focus is on the speech people actually use in different times and places and how they relate to social demography and identities.
As I may have said here, since I have arrived in Alicante I have heard two different ways of taking leave: first adiós and, second, hasta luego.
I would find myself getting irritated when people would say adiós to me. My inner response is “fine, then, I will never come back.” because to my ears, Adiós carries implications of finality. It should be used for big leave takings where a good time or forever will elapse before you return to be together.
My irritation led me to ask many people about their impressions. Broadly, South Americans agreed with my interpretation. And, to be sure, I realize that was where this idea was inculcated into me. In fact, in saying goodbye there are also degrees of formality in some places.
To put it simply, hasta luego is more formal than ciao which is also widely used. In the US ciao carries implications of claimed coolness for some social groups, and Italian-ness, while in South America it is the ordinary goodby for most circumstances unless one wants to insist on status, your’s or the other person’s.
Of course, there is a rich repertoire of ways of saying goodbye, just like in US English. In my Spanish, there is nos vemos which may well be an anglicism based on see you, though that is not how I learned it. I learned it in Spanish as simply Spanish. The anglicism for me would be to say ahi te watcho, or nos watchamos. Sometimes, among friends, I will pull these latter—based on an English verb conjugated in Spanish “to watch” which replaces the English to see: hence I’ll watch you instead of I’ll see you.
You start seeing here in my linguistic history some of the complexity of this little space of communication.
Thinking about nos vemos, has made me think about Bolivia where ciao (or chau as it is often spelled locally) is the dominant way of saying goodbye, presuming some kind of familiarity or equality among speakers. You can also duplicate it to create the common formula chau chau, kind of like the English bye bye, used on many occasions from ending phone calls to saying goodby to people face to face. It implies a bit of warmth and solidarity.
However, in the Aymara language, one of the two min indigenous languages of Bolivia which were numerically dominant when I first started going there in the seventies, the main and most common way of saying good bye I experienced was jikisiñkama, or jakisiñkama, the verb here is about meeting together or encountering each other.
In the Quechua of Bolivia I learned kutimunkama, also until we return. In Cusco{s Quechus, on the other hand, while that is understood, I was quickly corrected with their form, tupananchiskama, until we encounter each other again.
In Spanish in Bolivia and Peru, I have heard, especially young people use the English bye when taking leave.
Choices of ways to take leave taking bring in lots of variables of which I have mentioned 1) relative permanence of the separation, 2) formality or informality, 3) status of the speaker and the hearer—this also included perceived coolness, generation, and social status, 4) language and code switching, although subsumable in the variable of status, I will leave that for social difference such as class or ethnicity, we can also see status group membership such as rockers, generational groups, marihuanos (weed smokers), and so on, which also involve identities and social forms that cross national boundaries.
I want to go back to the beginning of this ramble: the relative permanence of the goodbye.
I already mentioned the contrast between ciao and adiós and how, based on that, I often feel when people say adiós they are telling me to go away and never come back. This has made me think about how I learned to say good bye in my home towns on the border and among Mexicans and Mexican American in Utah. Adiós was simply the neutral way of saying goodbye, without the emphasis on permanence or transitoriness.
Of course there were other ways, such as ahí te wacho, from the English see ya I imagine, and so on. If that normal English informal way of saying Bye entered border Spanish, of course the road had two ways. Adiós entered English, without the accent and with a short a and an elongated o. Similarly hasta luego became English in some circumstances. In all of them, you could measure relative formality or informality, but none of them had that meaning of just go away or the implication of not seeing each other again, the finality of the Andean adiós.
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