Soap operas, an unexpected Spanish school in Romania

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“I’m pregnant with your brother,” a girl told linguist Silvia Rivera shortly after arriving in Pitesti, the city where she went to live to learn Romanian. The year was 2009 and for Rivera, who had never seen soap operas in his native Costa Rica, this phrase was the starting point to discover the impact that Latin American soap operas have had on the spread of Spanish in Romania.

These serials entered the ex-communist countries of Eastern Europe in the nineties and, even today, fill hours and hours of fiction broadcast slots on Romanian television. In this country they are broadcast in Spanish, with Romanian subtitles. This, added to the fact that both are Romance languages ​​and have certain similarities, has led to some of the Romanians who see them becoming almost unconscious speakers of Spanish.

“I have never taken Spanish classes, all my knowledge comes from soap operas, although I have always been good at languages, so I guess that has helped,” says Ionut Geana, associate professor at the Faculty of Letters at the University of Bucharest. Geana tells Archiletras who began watching them regularly in his adolescence, in the early nineties, when they began to be broadcast on the only channel in the newly launched post-communist Romania.

Soap operas offered the possibility of seeing the lives and feelings of other people, a great incentive for a population that was emerging from a dark time. “I loved the suspenseful moments, the costumes, the twisted family relationships. They were a window to a world that I knew almost nothing about,” says Geana.

This young Romanian teacher remembers that most teachers told them to stop watching them, that they didn’t contribute anything, but that he didn’t care: “I loved the language. He repeated words and expressions, used them with friends and enemies during talks and discussions. They made me feel special, since, in my generation, we only studied French and English at school.”

Interested and surprised by the phenomenon, Silvia Rivera took advantage of her time in Romania to investigate the topic. As a result of this, in 2016, he published the article “Learning Spanish from soap operas? A contribution from the perspective of Romanian recipients.” After conducting a small sample with the Romanian population, he found that the majority of the people he surveyed had learned Spanish with them and that they had done so “without realizing it, involuntarily or unconsciously, by frequently watching episodes.”

“They don’t realize that they are learning until they discover it in a social situation in which they require the language,” explains Rivera. In this sense, the Costa Rican remembers with a laugh the conversations her Romanian classmates had in the residence where she lived: “It was very funny because, when they wanted to argue, they did it in Latin Spanish, with expressions taken from soap operas.”

Useful soap operas

“Shut your mouth, right now”, “get out of here”, “I never want to see you again in my life” are part of Ionut Geana’s initiatory vocabulary, derived from the high-tension scenes typical of soap operas and which confirm going in the line of what Rivera heard from his room.

Geana indicates that she also used to sing all the opening songs and that her favorites were those of the Mexican Crossed paths“although the queen of soap operas in Romania has been Marimarstarring the actress and singer Thalía. Such was his hobby that the professor confesses that he even wrote a letter in Spanish to the popular Mexican artist, but that his spelling made him too embarrassed and he never sent it to her.

Beyond funny anecdotes, the work carried out by Rivera reveals that the Spanish that the Romanian population has learned from soap operas has been of great benefit to find a job or to start a practical conversation when traveling to a Spanish-speaking country. Geana corroborates this: “During the three years I lived in the United States, Spanish has helped me a lot. Additionally, having visited Spain several times and Mexico once, the language barrier has never been a problem. Likewise, as a linguist, I always have Spanish in mind when I work on Romance linguistics.”