Why does Rosalía (and now everyone) like to 'whisper' so much?

BarcelonaRosalía has announced her podium three favorite words in Catalan and, like everything the artist does, this has also caused a great deal of controversy. reelsThere are supporters and detractors of the choice. Among the artist's three favorite words, the vast majority of ARA readers agree on including [words]. whisper at the top.In an Instagram poll, 70% chose this word, far ahead ofshelter (20%) and belly button (10%). But why is that quorum with the word whisperAnd why do we choose our favorite words?

The head of linguists at the ARA, Pau Domènech, explains it this way: "For three reasons: ear, heart, and homeland." On the one hand, words like whisper and mime They have a sound we like. "In Catalan, sibilants are popular: xeix, jotas and ges, voiced s's, cetas... And the more of these sounds combined, the better," he says. Furthermore, we might choose words that bring back "happy childhood memories or evoke pleasant concepts." And finally, words that "differ from neighboring languages, especially Spanish, or are very particular to each person's dialect (and therefore also differ from the rest of the Catalan-speaking world)" are favored.

Everyone knows their favorite Catalan word. José Enrique Gargallo, professor of Romance philology at the University of Barcelona, asks his students every year to tell him their favorite words. The answers are varied: in the afternoon, crave, at sunsetHe himself is clear about what he would say understand, yearning, clothe, beautiful and if, whisperamong others. He believes that the keys to the choice are "words with a literary flavor, particularly euphonious, or that designate concepts that arouse a special sensitivity: yearning, chanterelleDialectal preferences also find success, as do local phenomena such as... fogAnd he adds a personal reason through an anecdote: "I think of the great player and magnificent person that Johan Neeskens was, who fell in love with the expression cottonWhen he celebrated a goal, his teammates would whisper in his ear, "Cotton, cotton, cotton."

In the club of detractors of whisper There's the linguist Pau Vidal: "When Rosalía answers this, like the vast majority who say this word, she responds without thinking. It's actually an automatic mechanism; it's what they think is appropriate to say. It's already been established that the most beautiful word in Catalan is..." whisper and the second shelterThis has nothing to do with philology; it's political and about identity. We play defensively because we're the beaten dog: since we can't attack and take the initiative, we isolate ourselves from this hostile world in a false bubble of beauty where we feel comfortable. Any word with an axial fricative is the safe bubble where Spanish speakers don't enter. It's sentimentality made armor. Nobody can beat us at sugarcoating.

His favorite words

The writer Xavier Mas Craviotto recalls that, when he was a teacher in Bristol, whisper It was also the favorite word of his English students learning Catalan. "I'd say they like it because of its sound. It has a very beautiful cadence and connotes a reality that is also pleasant." For him, this game of choosing favorite words "shows that words are much more than instruments for naming the world, and the question forces us to look at words from another perspective": sound, experiences, connotations, memories, emotions. "I like it galipandriaBecause I like the way it sounds, but on the other hand, it designates a very unpleasant reality. On closer inspection, the word chlamydia "It has a beautiful sound and cadence, but it designates something terrible," he says, laughing. "Trying to dissociate sound, content, form, meaning, signifier... all of this has its charm!" he argues.

In the list of words proposed by ARA readers, indeed, all the requirements are met. Apart from the Rosalía-esque words, the most repeated are love, trousseau, butterfly, letterwound, mime, agave, mood and a long string of words and sound expressions like chino-xano, zigzag, to make a flow, corprendido, abigarrado, gomet, potato, swing, xerinola, to pamper, popcorn, pampering, embarrassment, meatball, this year, lamp, milindro, chafn, idiot and so on, as long as there are Catalan speakers.