Many people here ask me where I learnt to speak Spanish, and I am quite chuffed to say that this is normally accompanied by a comment on the quality of it. For those of you who don’t know, I learnt about six words in five years of study at high school, which was followed by a near-vertical learning curve when I went off to study geography at a university in Spain.

Cantabria, the province where I lived in Spain, is considered to be the cradle of the modern Spanish language. The political process that created the modern kingdom of Spain started there, a mechanism that consisted of either attacking neighbouring kingdoms or marrying their princesses (after all, all is fair in love and war). People there are very proud that theirs is a pure and noble strain of Spanish, perhaps an equivalent would be BBC English. This is the idiom and accent that I picked up in my time there, the way that s is pronounced halfway between s and sh in English, z and c pronounced like th, and the difficult to grasp soft d in the word Madrid. Refined, elegant, clear and generally rather fine.

However, coming here has had a rather disastrous effect, as this has become tainted by Caribbean Spanish, which is treated with the same incomprehension and semi-disguised disgust as Geordies are in English. Moreover, I am living with isolated mountain communities whose dictation has suffered the same fate as their genetic variation – it has become very messy, and rather limited. When I first got here things were a bit difficult, but I have become accustomed to this hillbilly/Geordie Spanish. Indeed, I don’t think I have pronounced an s or a t for several months now.

As well as loosing consonants, I have picked up some of the very specific words that are used up here, particularly the obscure ones used to describe agricultural activities. In their own way, these are rather poetic, and last week I made a concerted effort to learn the local variations on tree names, which include Man’s Face, Green Ebony, and Wood of the Cross (apparently, if planted next to your house it is guaranteed to keep witches away. I am tempted to plant one outside my office in Manchester to ensure that certain staff members leave me alone).

With Haiti as a neighbour, sometime ruler and general strong influence, Dominican Spanish contains words that have come via a convoluted journey from France and West Africa, as well as a smattering of words that originate from the various US invasions and from US hemispheric hegemony generally. There are also quite a few indigenous words that have survived the complete elimination of the previous occupants within fifty years of Columbus arriving. Some of these have even made it into English, including papaya, Jamaica, savannah, and more bizarrely, hammock and barbecue. However, with the large number of Haitian immigrants working in agriculture in the area, many of my neighbours who employ, work with or otherwise deal with them have come to learn no small amount of Kreyol, and this has become a regular feature of village conversations. Kreyol words have even managed to usurp their Spanish equivalents – nowadays no one in the village talks about eating their desayuno in the morning, but rather their manje. Crazy people are not loco but fou, and so on.

Given that these words are used mainly as a form of slang, and given the sort of thing that slang is perhaps best at dealing with, most of the Kreyol words I have picked up are part of the virtually unlimited variation referring to a very limited selection of the human anatomy. As my mother reads this, I am not going to go into details.