Do Chileans like everything small?

The first confusion on my arrival to my Chilean family. What is the name of my Chilean mom: “Sara or Sarita”. How should I call her? Does it mean the same? Everyone at home and school calls her Sarita. “Tecito”, “Cafecito”, “Pancito”– what is this?

For all those who do not know Spanish, in order to create diminutive, one needs to add “ito” or “ita” to words. Thus we have small Sara “Sarita”, small tee and small coffee or bread. Even our wifi name is diminutized form of mom’s grandson name (Franquito).

In fact my Chilean mom is really small, but neither tee nor coffee are served in small cups. They are regular ones just like in the most parts of the world.

At the beginning I was thinking that Chileans use diminutives in order to emphasis that something is really nice or just to create more sweet form of calling their love ones. But pretty fast I found out, they do not love small things, they just love to call them using diminutives.

The funny thing is that then something is really small and we want to stress that it is really small, Chileans would use double diminutives, i.e. small (chico) becomes “chicitito” – super small.

Giving a small summary, Chileans use diminutives most often in the following contexts:

• Affection – when calling or talking about their loved ones
• When something is really small
• To lessen the impact of some actions for instance when having once (tecito – just small tea)

So do not expect small complecito when someone offers you a complete (Chilenismo for hod-dog) or even better when someone tells you “Vuelvo rapidito” (I will be back very soon), it does  not mean few minutes, but rather couple of hours, basically he will be back some time.