First mystery solved: people from Lanzarote are conejeros — "rabbit people", most likely after the island's old abundance of rabbits — and they carry the nickname with a grin. Learn ten words and doors open. The guagua is the bus (say "wa-wa"). Chacho/chacha — from muchacho — starts half the island's sentences; ¡chos! is pure Lanzarote astonishment. A fisco is a little bit ("un fisco de queso"). Godos are mainland Spaniards (teasing, mostly affectionate). Enarenado is the ash-mulch farming, rofe or picón the volcanic gravel itself, the jable the sand corridor. Papas not patatas, millo not maíz — and "te vas a la playa, ¿no?" ends in that rising "¿no?" that makes everything a friendly question. Try them. Canarian Spanish is soft, musical and allergic to hurry — like the island.
Canarian Spanish is its own music — closer in melody to Havana than to Madrid, which is no accident: the islands supplied the Americas with emigrants for four centuries, and the accents went back and forth like the ships. The s at the end of syllables softens to a breath, the letter z sounds like s (no mainland "th" here), and ustedes replaces vosotros — grammatically polite, socially universal. If you speak textbook Spanish, you'll understand everything; if you listen closely, you'll hear the Atlantic in it.
Now the lexicon, in useful order. Guagua (bus) is the flagship — Cuba and the Canaries share it, and linguists still argue about the direction of travel. Chacho and chacha are the all-purpose openers, somewhere between "mate" and "wow": "¡Chacho, qué calor!". ¡Chos! is the island's own exclamation of surprise — Lanzarote and Fuerteventura use it where Tenerife says ¡ños! — and dropping a well-timed chos will earn you a delighted double-take. Fisco means a small amount, fleje (from "flexible steel strap", of all origins) means a lot: "un fisco de mojo, un fleje de papas". Godo is the sometimes-spiky, usually-teasing word for mainland Spaniards — context is everything. And enyesque is the little something to nibble with a drink: cheese, olives, lapas.
The farming words are a dialect within a dialect and half of them are on the menu of the landscape cards: enarenado (ash-mulch fields), rofe and picón (the volcanic gravel itself — hardware stores sell it by the sack), jable (the windblown sand corridor, from Norman French sable — a fossil of the 1402 conquest), zoco (the stone crescent guarding each vine), maretas and aljibes (the water-catching basins and cisterns of the thirsty centuries), gavias next door on Fuerteventura. Food adds papas, millo (corn), and the lovely puchero vocabulary; the sea adds the fish names — vieja, cherne, sama — that no dictionary translates well.
Two grace notes to finish. Mi niño / mi niña — "my child" — is standard-issue warmth applied to customers of any age; being called mi niño by a waiter three times your junior is a Canarian rite of passage, and it means things are going well. And the rhythm itself: sentences end on a gentle rise, "ahora" means "in a while", and "ya vamos viendo" — we'll see as we go — is less procrastination than philosophy. Learn the words, sure. But if you only learn the pace, you've learned the important part.