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SPAIN EXPLAINED

15 terms you need to know to understand Spanish bureaucracy

Spanish bureaucracy can be as complicated as it is overwhelming. Whether or not you speak the language, getting your head around the terminology can be difficult. The Local has broken down the top 15 terms you should know when braving Spanish bureaucracy.

Published: 18 March 2022 16:34 CET
15 terms you need to know to understand Spanish bureaucracy
A civil servant explains the bureaucratic process in Madrid in March 2000. Photo: Christophe Simon/AFP

Almost all foreigners living abroad love to complain about the bureaucracy in their adopted homelands. This is particularly true in Spain, where processes are known to take weeks or even months and the civil servants are infamous for their unpredictability.

READ MORE: What you need to know – The Local’s A to Z guide to bureaucracy in Spain

Arriving in a new country can be tough as it is, let alone in a different language, so see our guide to the key terminology you’ll need to navigate Spanish bureaucracy below:

Ayuntamiento – The town hall. Get used to this word and building because it’s a place you’ll no doubt spend a lot of time in when doing any official bureaucratic processes or paperwork.

Empadronamiento – One of the first things you must do when you arrive in Spain (to live) is register at the ayuntamiento on the Padrón to prove you are living in Spain. Normally to get the certificate (el certificado de empadronamiento) you’ll need to provide a rental contract or recent bill.

Padrón – The Register of Spanish Inhabitants at the town hall.

Cita Previa – Literally, prior or previous appointment, a lot of bureaucracy requires you to make an appointment online beforehand. This is particularly true in big cities, but often the online booking systems aren’t the most reliable so hanging around until someone sees you works occasionally in smaller towns.

NIE – Your número de Identificación de Extranjeros, or foreigner’s identification number, allocated to you by the police and is essential to be legally resident, pay taxes, buy and sell property, and open a bank account in Spain. Be warned, the process can be quite laborious and involves going back and forth between the police station and bank to pay various small taxes and have papers stamped.

Cuenta Bancaria – bank account. Although you can technically open a bank account without the NIE, without it you’ll only be able to open a bank account for non-residents which includes extra fees.

Gestor – many foreigners in Spain pay for a ‘gestor’ (like an agent) to handle all their administrative and bureaucratic processes, act as a middleman and help with translating.

Tarjeta Sanitaria – health card.

Seguridad social – social security. You’ll be given a number by your employer, if you have one, or you can get one at your nearest INSS office.

IRPF – Impuesto sobre la Renta de Personas Físicas is the equivalent of Spanish income tax.

Agencia Tributaria – The tax office.

Autónomos – self-employed. Be aware, the tax rates freelancers and the self-employed pay in Spain is a source of controversy and a fluid situation. The government recently proposed changes to the system.

Declaración de la Renta – annual tax declaration.

Homologación – the word for getting your foreign qualifications validatedin Spanish. This might be necessary when applying for certain jobs.

Funcionario – public worker. It is said that Spanish bureaucracy is personalised – the problem is that it isn’t personalised for you but whichever public official or civil servant you see that day. Funcionarios aren’t known to be the most helpful of people, and won’t take kindly to English speakers.

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LEARNING SPANISH

Do people in Spain actually use the formal ‘usted’ form anymore?

It was once common in Spain, but nowadays the formal 'usted' (you) form is rarely used besides in some pretty specific situations. So why is the more informal 'tú' form becoming ever more dominant among Spaniards?

Published: 14 May 2024 11:12 CEST
Updated: 14 May 2024 12:58 CEST
Do people in Spain actually use the formal 'usted' form anymore?

If you live in Spain or spend time here, you’ve probably heard the word tú (you) a fair bit. It’s one of the very first words you learn when learning Spanish, and pretty crucial (obviously).

But you may have also occasionally heard Spanish speakers using the word usted (also meaning you) from time to time too.

It’s far more likely that you hear tú in Spain, but perhaps if you’ve heard a respectful younger Spaniard talking to an elderly neighbour, or their boss on the phone, or even watched something like a political debate or interview on TV, you probably heard usted used.

Similarly, if you have noticed usted being used while out and about in Spain, it could well have been from the large Latino population in Spain, and it’s likely that you heard Colombians, Venezuelans or other Latinos saying it.

READ ALSO: Why Spain has allowed regional languages to be spoken in Congress

Though they do sometimes use it, the use of usted among Spaniards is slightly different, much rarer, and saved for select circumstances.

In fact, it’s becoming so rare in Spain that some feel its usage is dying out completely, if it hasn’t already.

So, what’s going on here?

Usted vs tú

Firstly, let’s start with a definition. According to the Real Academia Española (RAE) usted is a:

“Form which, in the nominative, in the vocative or preceded by a preposition, designates the person addressed by the speaker or writer… [used] generally as a polite, respectful or distancing address.”

Eg) disculpe, ¿sabe usted dónde está el hospital? (excuse me, do you know where the hospital is?)

In understanding the usted form specifically in Castilian Spanish – Spanish spoken in parts of Latin America it can be slightly or very different, depending where you are – that last part of the definition is key: “generally as a polite, respectful or distancing address.”

It’s worth noting that with usted the verbs are conjugated as if they were third-person singular (el as in he or ella as in she), so it’s usted sabe instead of tú sabes. 

Usted is a form used to show respect or seniority: that you understand there’s a hierarchy (in which usted is at the top, so for example when speaking to your boss or someone interviewing you for a job), but also occasionally to mark social distance between two people (because tú could be considered overly friendly in certain situations) and then, finally, it’s also used more generally to show respect in terms of seniority, like when speaking to an elderly person.

Tú vs usted in Spain

Respectfulness is the key word here. In short, if you hear usted used in Spain, it’s probably for a reason.

In Spain, usted is generally only ever used with authority figures, the elderly and in some formal and/or professional settings, but many Spaniards will just skip over it and use the tú form. Tú can be used with everyone else: your friends, partners, neighbours (around your age or younger), siblings, co-workers, kids, and other people you don’t know but are roughly your age or younger.

In fact, in some cases people might actually be offended if you use the usted form because you could be implying that they’re old, a mistake or social faux pas that is somewhat similar to calling a woman señora and then being quickly corrected (usually with a scornful look) that is should be señorita.

In such cases, they may say trátame de tú (treat me as ‘less formal’ you) or me puedes tutear. 

The verb tutear actually means to speak to someone using the more informal tú form. 

The only part of Spain where the plural form of usted – ustedes – is used all the time is the Canary Islands and some parts of southern Andalusia, where locals prefer this form instead of the standard Castillian vosotros (you in plural). That doesn’t mean that they say usted instead of tú in the singular form, this exception only applies to the plural.

Do people actually use the formal usted form anymore in Spain?

Less and less. It’s dying out in Spain, has been for a while, and is now reserved for those rare occasions outlined above. It’s thought by linguistic experts that it began dying out in the 1970s and 1980s.

The use of usted in Castillian Spanish is now very rarely used in casual conversation. In many cases can only be heard in very formal or ceremonial settings, such as in judiciary, the army, or in certain academic culture contexts or events.

In day to day life, usted only really shows up (besides the examples given above) in advertising, something that generally needs to reflect cultural attitudes and keep up with modern day parlance, so now only really uses the usted form in some specific campaigns for financial services or medical products. As such, depending on the context and age of the people involved, you could also hear usted in spoken Spanish in banks and doctors or hospitals.

An article in Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia entitled ‘Usted is dying’ published back in 2012 looked into the disappearance of the formal form in detail. The fact it was published over a decade ago means that, if anything, the trends it discusses have deepened since then and usted is even lesser used than it was then.

“The use of usted has been reserved for very formal campaigns where a kind of protocol respect for the interlocutor is maintained,” Josep Maria Ferrara, founder and creative director of the Paulov advertising agency, told La Vanguardia.

But this was not the case twenty or thirty years ago. A study on the use of tú and usted in advertising at the end of the 1980s showed that the usted form was used for the most part and that only 11 percent of the advertisements analysed used the tú form.

Changing world, changing language?

So, what changed? Secundino Valladares, professor of Anthropology at the Madrid’s Complutense University, says that Spaniards have embraced tú to such an extent “that the phenomenon is now unstoppable; young people, educated in ‘tuteo’ [the use of the tú form] are sweeping to victory with the tú, and as society is dominated by the value of youth… many older people feel flattered if you tú them,” he said.

In Spain in the 1940s and 1950s the usted form was still well established in many parent-child relationships, and in teacher-student relationships until well into the 1970s. But a changing world and progressive, more egalitarian political ideas seems to be partly responsible for the change. Of course, in Spain, this linguistic shift may have something to do with the changing power and interpersonal dynamics of Spanish society as it transitioned from dictatorship to democracy around this time.

Headline by Spanish radio station Cope reads “Speaking to the teacher at school with the usted form must be brought back”.

Sociologist Antonio López pointed to this trend: “The tendency towards a more egalitarian society, towards the loss of hierarchical distances in social relations, means that it does not seem right to establish prior distances and that is why tú is used instead of usted, which for many denotes distance.”

In that sense, the decline in the formal usted form can be understood both in terms of the laid back nature of Castilian Spanish compared with countries in Latin America, but also in terms of language reflecting social change, similarly to how today, in modern day Spain, there is debate over the use of inclusive language and the dominance of the masculine form in Spanish grammar.

READ ALSO: What is Spain’s inclusive language debate and why is it so controversial?

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