Word of the Week: Ojala

In the first weeks in a new place you are inspired by just about anything. Every day you discover half a dozen new things that just give you some feeling of excitement and make you want to interview locals on it for hours. Sometimes they even have the patience to explain things to you in detail, and answer all your stupid questions. A small idea for the coming months: word of the week. A word that cannot be translated, has some special significance for my stay here, or just sounds funny. The first in the series: Ojala. It would be funny if you stopped reading for a moment, to come up with some theories on what this word could mean. Just write it down for yourself, and then see if you came close.

So what does ‘ojala’ mean? I can tell you right away that it is not some Nigerian defender playing in the Championship. It is a funny sounding word that cannot be directly translated into English, Dutch or German, even though all three of these languages use the expression it stands for. Here in Peru, and I think in most Spanish speaking countries, the word is used in two different ways. The first is at the beginning of a sentence: ‘Ojala que mañana no lluva.’ The second is as a reaction to something someone else said. ‘Creo que voy conseguirlo.’ ‘Ojala.’ Anyone that can understand some Spanish should have a gut feeling by now of how to use it and what it is, even though actually translating it is harder. For those of you speaking Portuguese, you could translate it as ‘tomará’ or ‘se Deus quiser’. You could even say that it is an almost perfect translation of the latter, even though we don’t find the word ‘Dios’ in there. That is because Spanish itself originally copied ‘ojala’ from Arabic. The Arabic wa-š’ allh means ‘and may God will it’, much like the more known ‘inshalla’. So the actual meaning is something like ‘God willing’, but to understand its use in Spanish it is better to translate it as ‘I really hope that…’. A middle way could be ‘May God grant that…’

And so we have learned how to use another new word. Just try it once or twice the next couple of days. Only then you get it in your system and really learn to use it in phrases. Ojalá that you understood its use well….