Costa Rican Spanish

Costa Rican Spanish is the form of the Spanish language spoken in Costa Rica.

The distinguishing characteristics of Costa Rican phonetics include the following:

Usted is the predominant second person singular pronoun in Costa Rican Spanish. Some speakers use only usted in addressing others, never vos or tú. Others use both usted and vos, according to the situation.

Vos is a second person singular pronoun used by many speakers in certain relationships of familiarity or informal contexts. Voseo is widely use between friends, family, people of the same age, etc. It is also commonly used in the university context between students. Some adults use vos to address children or juveniles, but other adults address everyone regardless of age or status with usted. Costa Ricans tend to use usted with foreigners.

Tú is rarely used in Costa Rican Spanish. However, due in part to the influence of Mexican television programming, Costa Ricans are familiar with tuteo, and some television viewers, especially children, have begun to use it in limited contexts. Tú is avoided by educated Costa Ricans; people tend to associate ticos who use tú with poorly educated people (people who mix tú, vos and usted in their speech) and are perceived as spending too much time watching Mexican, Colombian and Venezuelan telenovelas.

Costa Ricans are colloquially called "ticos" (based on the frequent use of the diminutive ending -ico following a /t/, as in momentico), and thus colloquial expressions characteristic of Costa Rica are called tiquismos. Tiquismos and pachuquismos are used frequently in Costa Rica. The latter are expressions of popular street Spanish which can be considered vulgar and offensive if used in the wrong context. Many of these words, even when found in a standard Spanish dictionary, do not have the same meaning there as in Costa Rica. Learning colloquial expressions can be a guide to understanding the humor and character of the Costa Rican culture.

Here are some examples of Costa Rican slang.

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