El trufi a El Alto

The Scene

One morning gets a learner through most of highland Bolivian Spanish. Camila and Sergio take a trufi and a cable car, buy a salteña, haggle with a casera, collect a yapa and come home with an aguayo — and along the way Camila uses the double possessive, ¿no ve?, pe, nomás and two diminutives on adverbs without pausing. Sergio, up from Santa Cruz, supplies the contrast — elay, a jacket he needed, no head for altitude — and, once the city opens up below him, the reportative pluperfect the whole guide is built on: ¡había sido rapidísimo!

Vocabulary Highlights

• el trufi — the fixed-route shared taxi: trufi, a word only Bolivia uses.
• la wawa — the baby: wawa, straight from Quechua and Aymara.
• casero / casera — what buyer and seller call each other, all day, everywhere.
• la yapa — the free handful added on top: yapa.
• había sido — “so it turns out”: the Andean reportative pluperfect, and the most Bolivian grammar there is.
• ¿no ve? / pe / nomás — the tag, the sentence-prop and the softener.
• harto — a lot, loads. Nothing to do with being fed up.
• el jailón — the posh one: jailón, from English high.
• ch’aki — a hangover, from Aymara for “dry”.
• elay — the cruceño exclamation, and the fastest way to place a lowlander.

Read the Bolivian Spanish survival guide for the grammar behind all of this, or the Bolivia hub for how the altiplano and the lowlands divide the country.

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.