El partido del barrio
Saturday afternoon in Tegucigalpa: a concrete pitch, a match against the neighbourhood up the hill, six baleadas from doña Cinthia's shop afterwards, and an argument about who still has any money the day after payday.
Reinforces vocabulary from Honduran Spanish: A Survival Guide.
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The Scene
Two hours in a Tegucigalpa neighbourhood covers the working half of Honduran Spanish: vos four times, cheque and cheque leche, alero, bolo, macizo, pulpería, baleada, pisto, andar hule, la quincena, maje, pijín, guaro, jalón and vaya pues. Notice that tú never appears once — not because anybody is avoiding it, but because in Honduras it simply does not come up.
Vocabulary Highlights
- vos — the second person, full stop: vos vas, entrá, llevá. Vos.
- cheque — OK, got it: cheque, from English check, with cheque leche as the joke version.
- el alero — the close friend: alero.
- macizo — excellent: macizo. It agrees with what it describes, and stands unchanged as a bare exclamation.
- el pisto / andar hule — money, and having none of it: pisto, andar hule.
- la quincena — the fifteenth, and the reason everybody is broke by the twelfth.
- la baleada — the national dish, and mantequilla that is not butter.
- la pulpería — the corner shop that sees everything.
- el pijín / el guaro — the night out and what fuels it: pijín, guaro.
- dar jalón — to give someone a lift.
- vaya pues — right then, agreed, see you: vaya pues.
Read the Honduran Spanish survival guide for the pronoun system and the coast-and-cordillera split behind all of this, or the Honduras hub for the country’s full linguistic map.
This scene only scratches the surface — the full chapter is in Daily Life and Culture, part of our Speak Spanish Like a Native book series.