regional.ve.lexicon
Chévere, pana, dame la cola: everyday Venezuelan words
Venezuela gave chévere to the whole Spanish-speaking world and kept a great deal more for itself: pana for a friend, chamo for a guy, cambur for a banana, caraota for a black bean, and dame la cola for a lift. Emigration has since carried much of it across the continent.
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Explanation
Food is where the divergence is widest, because Venezuela renames staples that have different names almost everywhere else. A cambur is a banana (plátano elsewhere, where plátano in Venezuela is specifically the plantain). Caraotas are black beans — frijoles in Mexico, porotos in the Southern Cone. A patilla is a watermelon (sandía elsewhere). Coffee has its own vocabulary too: a guayoyo is a weak black filter coffee, a marrón is coffee with milk in roughly equal parts, and a negrito a small black one. Arepa and cachapa need no translation but do need explaining to anyone who has not been.
The social layer is Caribbean in rhythm and unmistakably Venezuelan in detail. Chamo and chama address a young man or woman and work as a general "hey". Pana is a friend, and pana mío close to "my man". Chévere means great, and it is Venezuela's most successful export — it is now understood from Cuba to Peru. Burda de is an intensifier, burda de bueno meaning really good. Vaina is the all-purpose thing, shared with Colombia and the wider Caribbean. Epa is a greeting, and a cotufa is popcorn. Dame la cola asks for a lift, and echar los perros means to flirt with someone.
Two cautions. First on register: coño is extremely frequent in Venezuelan speech, including in coño de madre and as a bare exclamation, and it is far milder there than the same word in Spain or Mexico — recognise it, but do not calibrate your own use from what you hear. Arreche and arrecho are similarly variable, meaning angry, brave or excellent depending on context and country, and vulgar in some. Second on geography: since 2015 large-scale emigration has spread Venezuelan Spanish across Colombia, Peru, Chile, Ecuador and beyond, so this vocabulary is increasingly encountered far from Venezuela — chévere and pana in particular no longer locate a speaker.
Examples
Can you give me a lift into town?
Region: VE
Hey man, all good?
Region: VE
Black beans with an arepa and a banana.
Region: VE
That film is really good, mate.
Region: VE