I learned very proper European Spanish when I was studying it as a teenager. As an adult, I took private courses from a Chilean lady and she went to great lengths to keep me on track and not introduce Chile-isms into my vocabulary.

Well, the European Spanish has pretty much been out the door since I got to Mexico. I had to tone down my accent quickly because I was having a hard time being understood here. What I was taught is pronounced ther-bay-tha is pronounced ser-vay-za here. I’ve also had to learn new words for common things; durazno rather than melocotón for peach, jugo rather than zumo for juice. It’s rather like a Brit learning to say pry-vacy rather than pri-vacy, truck and eraser rather than lorry and rubber.

One of the first Mexican Spanish-isms that I encountered when I got here was ¿Mande?

I took this to mean “What?”, as in a rude “I didn’t hear you, repeat yourself” because I could recognize that it comes from the verb “to give an order.” I heard ¿Mande? quite a bit when I got to Isla until a kind neighbour informed me that the problem wasn’t my use of language, but my accent and I started to work on toning it down.

But as the months here in Mexico pushed on and I kept hearing ¿Mande?, not just directed at me, I figured that there is no way all Mexicans were rude. Tonight, after an encounter this morning, I finally researched the phrase.

Lo and behold, ¿Mande? is the absolute most polite way in Mexico to let someone know you didn’t understand them! It can mean “What did you ask?” or “Please repeat yourself” or “What can I get you?”, among many other nuances.

The opposite of ¿Mande? on the politeness scale is ¿Qué?, which is literally “What?”

What happened this morning was an encounter at the grocery store. They have a new gal attending to the deli counter and she is really putting me off from shopping there. First of all, she has no sense of hygiene, using her bare hands to handle the cheese and meats. EW. Even though the City Deli has the best price I’ve found for Chihuahua cheese, I no longer buy it there because of that.

But more on point to this post, whenever I order from her she asks me ¿Mande? at least three times before fetching my order. I thought she might be hard of hearing except that her tone really is harsh and bordering on rude and she has no trouble hearing the other customers the first time they speak.

Since no one else I encounter in my interactions is saying ¿Mande? to me regularly anymore, I really didn’t think the issue is the quality of my language. So I began to suspect that she was just not happy to be serving a Gringa and was being purposely rude.

This was pretty much confirmed to me this morning when I carefully enunciated ‘Veinte pesos de tocino’ and she replied ¿Mande? A man came out of the back of the store and addressed her sharply, saying that he had heard me clearly the first time on this visit and on all preceding visits!

Holy smokes, my assumption was correct, that she was being purposely rude to me! And by using a polite form of “What?” she was actually being doubly rude.

For more information on this Mexican phrase, check out Mande in Spanish is not Monday.

And finally, back to ther-bay-thas for a moment, European Spanish pronounces the soft C and Z as the English sound T-H.

One of my absolutely earliest memories is of being in grade one, still very much learning English, and flinging a pencil across the room because I could not pronounce the TH sound and would never be able to pronounce my last name!

So thank you, English, for paving the way to my apparently gorgeous, but almost impossible to understand in Mexico, Spanish accent!