The Spanish Spoken in Chile: A Dialect or a Language?

I’ve long been a fan of La Linguriosa (Elena Herraiz), a Spanish linguist with a “superinteresante” YouTube channel. In the video released today, she’s talking about Chilean Spanish. It’s true that when spoken quickly by people whose education deprived them of learning standard Spanish, Chilean Spanish can be difficult to understand. I remember working in an office in Madrid in the early 1980s, when one of the secretaries (a refugee from Pinochet’s excesses?) introduced me to certain Chilean phonemes (especially “ch” for “tr,” as in nosochos instead of nosotros).

Language is a source of constant interest and joy for me. I’ve started playing Lingule daily along with Wordle, Geoguesser and bridge (massively fail on Australian indigenous and African languages, but I’m learning).