The Murcian region has many particularities and one of them is the language. Panocho, the regional dialect of Spanish, is rather formed by the regionalism words they are using that makes it sometimes difficult for other Spaniards to understand it. As being a vast agricultural land, many of the “new” words determine ranch names. It is often said that panocho is the lengua de la huerta, the language of the ranch that is, and has many differences in what is known to be murciano as language (if you ask Murcians) or dialect (if you ask anyone else).
Murciano is believed to be a variation of an old form of Castellano that developed separately than the rest of the language itself due to its influences from the area. Looking back along 7 centuries, the Murcian Kingdom had great influences from the Crown of Aragon and the Crown of Castile, not to leave aside the Arabic presence.
Other languages have thus influenced the development of murciano
Aragones - after the Christian conquering of the area
Catalan - through the influence brought by the Aragon Kingdom
Mozarabe or the Andalusian Romance - the dialectal Latin, Hispanic Latin spoken in the territories of the Iberian Peninsula with the Islamic influences
Panocho is the name under which many village-life related words have been further transmitted, as it is spoken in huertas. Its main characteristic is replacing letters of the words deforming the spoken language.
Despite the controversies regarding its past and formation, you can definitely notice the differences with other regions’ Castellano.
Murcians are renowned for their pleasure to eat and that is applicable to the language too. Acho, very used here comes in fact from muchacho, as in “boy” and this is just one example. Letters fade away like the fairy dust from their mouth, the most often unpronounced letters being “s” and “r”. For a non-native speaker it might be sometimes difficult to understand the tense or person of the verb as the appearance or absence of “s” can totally change the meaning.
Another particularity that seems to annoy other Spaniards, but I found it quite funny, is the way they construct the diminutive forms. In Spanish, if you want to say “little house” you would say casita (from casa). Well, in this region, you wouldn’t hear casita but casica as the diminutive is formed with C instead of T.
Learning Spanish in Murcia can be quite challenging once you go to other parts as they very easy can notice the Murcian fingerprint on you, yet it’s for sure an interesting linguistic approach you should try.