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Gerald's Spanish Language Blog

By Gerald Erichsen, About.com Guide to Spanish Language since 1998

Pope Shows Adeptness With Spanish

Thursday April 17, 2008
For those of us living in the United States, it isn't all that common to hear someone speaking Spanish with a German accent. But Pope Benedict XVI's Spanish pronunciation is, not surprisingly, quite good and easily understandable, as he showed during a Mass this morning in Washington, D.C.

I'm not sure what it is about popes that makes them so adept at languages — maybe it's a divine gift. Benedict is said to be fluent in seven languages, and that pales to what his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, could comfortably handle.

Because a large part of the U.S. Catholic population, and certainly the fastest-growing part, is made up of Spanish-speaking immigrants, it's a sure bet that portions of events that pope is taking part in during his visit to the United States this week are in Spanish. You can follow the pope's travels in Spanish on television on the EWTN Spanish feed, but even the English version of EWTN is carrying the Spanish-language portion of events without talking over them in English.

Comments

April 20, 2008 at 5:02 pm
(1) mt says:

It’s not that being pope makes one adept at languages. It’s that fluency in multiple languages is one of the qualifications for the job.

April 22, 2008 at 3:14 pm
(2) rlpmjp says:

and continuing the previous comment… it is being European not being a Pope that has more to do with the language background. European schools (monastic, public, etc.) teach more years of languages than US schools.

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