Luis Orlando Ruiz Medina, his mother Deilys Medina and his brother celebrate on stage after Luis wins the Pflugerville ISD Spanish Spelling Bee. The local win qualified him for the national competition.
. He did it by spelling “piragüismo” — a word that is not very common, even among native Spanish speakers. Now he will compete against 29 other kids from nine different states for the national prize.“I think that might be hard for English speakers, because in English I don’t think we have accents like we do in Spanish, or the 'diéresis,'” he says, referring to the umlaut in words like “bilingüe.”another tricky word on the list, since the “nm” can sound like a double “m.
Jocelly Meiners, a linguistics professor at UT Austin, explains that activities such as spelling bees help heritage speakers — people who learn a language through exposure at home — get a better understanding of that language. That's important because spelling in Spanish is not as phonetic as many would believe.
“Those types of little nuances can confuse our bilingual kids when speaking or writing in Spanish because they have the English spelling ingrained in their minds,” Meiners says.