I noticed this last night in a window of a corner store in my neighborhood and thought it was great. I’m not a native Spanish speaker but English wasn’t my first language either, so I understand what the message means beyond simply understanding what the words mean.

If you don’t know Spanish, what “Te extrano” is trying to say is “I miss you.” But it’s spelled incorrectly. It’s spelled in English. In Spanish it would be “Te extraño.” The little mark on top of the N, the tilde, turning the n into a letter that doesn’t exist in English, not an N but an Enye.  With the ñ the word sounds like “extranyo.” To say it otherwise just sounds like a strange, foreign mispronunciation–a mispronunciation you experience often if you’re Hispanic in the US. “Sin la ñ no es español” means: “Without the ñ, it’s not Spanish.“

What I seriously dig about this message is that it manages to capture and reflect the experience of a particular population, a particular identity, and says “We understand.” That’s what the best advertising does.