Following on from yesterdays rant about if you want to sell in Spain, speak Castellano and not your regional dialect, it’s a little ironic that today’s El Mundo is reporting that Seville born footballer Sergio Ramos is in trouble for sarcastically asking a Catalan reporter “you want it in Andaluz?”
The team was in Salamanca for yesterdays game against Lithuania when a Catalan reporter at the press conference stood up and had a long chat with fellow teammate Gerard Piqué in Catalan, whilst everyone else stood around feeling bored and waiting for them to finish.
The reporter then asked Sergio a question in Castellano, to which he snapped back “Which language? You want it in Andaluz? I’ll say it in Andaluz, Andaluz is a fine language to communicate in – he [the reporter] may have trouble understanding if I speak in Castellano“.
Sergio later explained to annoyed Catalans, via his Facebook account, that it was a joke, and everyone was taking this far too seriously. Gerard later sent out a picture of the two hugging each other on his twitter account to reassure people that he thought it had been a fine joke.
Andaluz, by the way, is a bit like saying “cockney” in English, it’s simply the local dialect / slang. Certainly not a language, which was the joke. Get it? Heh, he’s paid to kick a ball, not make you laugh.
As is the way of the world, this has attracted 1062 comments in the 10 hours or so it’s been up on El Mundo…