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Rioplatense Spanish
Rioplatense Spanish is a dialect of the Spanish language which is mainly spoken in the areas in and around the Rio de la Plata basin, in Argentina and Uruguay.
Location
Rioplatense is mainly based in the cities of Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Rosario, the three most populated cities in the area, along with their respective suburbs and the areas in between. This regional form of Spanish is also found in other areas, not geographically close but culturally influenced by those population centers. Rioplatense is the standard in audiovisual media in Argentina and Uruguay. To the northeast exists the hybrid Riverense Portunol.
Influences on the language
The Spaniards brought their language to the area during the Spanish colonization in the region. Originally part of the Viceroyalty of Peru, the Rio de la Plata basin had its status lifted to Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata in 1776.
Until other peoples's massive immigration to the region, the language of the Rio de la Plata had virtually no influence of other languages and varied mainly by the means of localisms. Argentinians and Uruguayans often boast that they, like the United States and Canada, are mostly composed of people of more or less recent European descent, the largest being of Spanish and Italian descent.
European immigration
Several languages influenced the criollo Spanish of the time, because of the diversity of settlers and immigrants to Argentina and Uruguay:
18701890: mainly Spanish, Basque, Galician and Northern Italian speakers and some from France, Germany, and other European countries.
19101945: Again from Spain, Southern Italy and in smaller numbers from across Europe; Jewish immigration, mainly from Russia and Poland from the 1910s until after World War II was also large.
English speakers, from Britain and Ireland, were not as great in numbers as the Italian one but were influential in the upper classes , industry, business, education and agriculture.
Influence of indigenous populations in Argentina
Native American languages have largely been influenced or even wiped out by Spanish in the area, as native populations were decimated during the conquest of the Region. The influence has been reciprocal, though, with words from Guarani, Quechua and other languages being incorporated into the Spanish of the region, and some have even reached English.
Some words of American origin commonly used in Rioplatense Spanish are:
From Quechua: gaucho (orig. wakcha "poor person"); pochoclo ("popcorn")
From Guarani: pororo (also "popcorn")
See Influences on the Spanish language for a more comprehensive review of borrowings into all dialects of Spanish.
Linguistic features
Vocabulary
Differences between dialects of Spanish are numerous; about 9,000 Rioplatense words are not used or, in many cases, even understood elsewhere. These include many terms from the basic vocabulary, such as words for fruits, garments, foodstuffs, car parts, etc., as well as local slang.
The vocabularies of both varieties are further diverging as Rioplatense Spanish tends to borrow (or calque) technical words from American English, while Castilian Spanish tends to borrow or calque them from British English or French. Yet still it sometimes differs from other Spanish in North America.
Phonology
Rioplatense Spanish distinguishes itself from other dialects of Spanish by the pronunciation of certain consonants.
Like many other dialects, Rioplatense features yeismo: the sounds represented by ll (the palatal lateral ) and y (historically the palatal approximant ) have fused into one. This merged phoneme is generally pronounced as a postalveolar fricative, either voiced in the central and western parts of the dialect region (this phenomenon is called zheismo) or voiceless in and around Buenos Aires (called sheismo) These are the sounds in English measure and mission, or the French j and ch, respectively. That is, in Rioplatense, se cayo "he fell down" is homophonous with se callo "he became silent".
The fricative /s/ has a tendency to become 'aspirated' before another consonant or simply in all syllable-final positions in less educated speakers. This change may be realized only at the word level or it may also cross word boundaries. That is, esto es lo mismo "this is the same" is pronounced something like , but in las aguilas azules "the blue eagles", in las and aguilas might remain as it's not followed by a consonant , or become (the exact pronunciation is largely an individual choice.)
In some areas, speakers tend to drop the final r sound in verb infinitives. This elision is considered a feature of uneducated speakers in some places, but it is widespread in others, at least in rapid speech.
Aspiration of s, together with loss of final r and some common instances of diphthong simplification, tend to produce a noticeable simplification of the syllable structure, giving Rioplatense a distinct fluid consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel rhythm:
Si queres irte, andate. Yo no te voy a parar.
"If you want to go then go. I'm not gonna stop you."
Intonation
Preliminary research has shown that Rioplatense Spanish, and particularly the speech of the city of Buenos Aires, has intonation patterns that resemble those of Italian dialects, and differ markedly from the patterns of other Argentine forms of Spanish. [*] This correlates well with immigration patterns. Argentina, and particularly Buenos Aires, had huge numbers of Italian settlers since the 19th century.
According to a study conducted by National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina, and published in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (ISSN 1366-7289) [*] Buenos Aires residents speak with an intonation most closely resembling Neapolitan. The researchers note that this is relatively recent phenomenon, starting in the beginning of the 20th century with the main wave of Southern Italian immigration. Before that, the porteno accent was more similar to that of Spain, especially Andalusia. [*]
Pronouns and verb conjugation
One of the features of the Argentine and Uruguayan speaking style is the voseo: the usage of the pronoun vos for the second person singular, instead of tu. Voseo is also used in other places around the Spanish-speaking community, but it is usually considered a nonstandard lower-class sociolectic or regional variant, whereas in Argentina, voseo is standard. Vos is used with forms of the verb that resemble those of the second person plural (vosotros) in traditional (Spain's) Castilian Spanish.
The second person plural pronoun, which is vosotros in Spain, is replaced with ustedes in Rioplatense, like most other Latin American dialects. While usted is the formal second person singular pronoun, its plural ustedes has a neutral connotation and can be used to address friends and acquaintances as well as in more formal occasions (see T-V distinction). Ustedes takes a grammatically third person plural verb.
As an example, see the conjugation table for the verb amar in the present tense, indicative mode:
Tu amas is only used in Uruguay, where it coexists with Vos amas. However, it should be noted that tu and vos are not interchangeably used, but rather vos denotes a more intimate relationship between the parties in conversation. In formal speech, usted ama.
Ustedes is used throughout all of Latin America. It is also used in formal speech for the second person plural in Spain.
Although apparently there is just a stress shift (from amas to amas), the origin of such a stress is the loss of the diphthong of the ancient vos inflection from vos amais to vos amas. This can be better seen with the verb "to be": from vos sois to vos sos. In vowel-alternating verbs like perder and morir, the stress shift also triggers a change of the vowel in the root:
For the -ir verbs, the Castilian vosotros forms end in -is, so there is no diphthong to simplify, and Rioplatense vos employs the same form: instead of tu vives, vos vivis; instead of tu vienes, vos venis (note the alternation).
The imperative forms for vos are identical to the plural imperative forms in Castilian minus the final -d (stress remains the same):
Habla mas alto, por favor. "Speak louder, please." (hablad in Castilian)
Come un poco de torta. "Eat some cake." (comed in Castilian)
Veni para aca. "Come over here." (venid in Castilian)
The plural imperative uses the ustedes form .
As for the subjunctive forms of vos verbs, while they tend to take the tu conjugation, some speakers do use the classical vos conjugation, employing the vosotros form minus the i in the final diphthong. Many consider only the tu subjunctive forms to be correct.
Espero que veas or Espero que veas "I hope you can see" (Castilian veais)
Lo que quieras or (less used) Lo que queras "Whatever you want" (Castilian querais)
In the preterite tense, an s is often added, for instance (vos) perdistes. This corresponds to the classical vos conjugation found in literature. Compare Iberian Spanish form vosotros perdisteis. However, it is often deemed incorrect.
Other verb forms coincide with tu after the i is omitted (the vos forms are the same as tu).
Si salieras "If you went out" (Castilian salierais)
Usage
In the old times, vos was used as a respectful term. In Rioplatense, as in most other dialects which employ voseo, this pronoun has become informal, shoving out the use of tu . It is used especially for addressing friends and family members (regardless of age), but may also include most acquaintances, such as coworkers, friends of one's friends, etc.
Usage of tenses
Although literary works use the full spectrum of verb inflections, in Rioplatense (as well as many other Spanish dialects), the future tense has been replaced by a verbal phrase (periphrasis) in the spoken language.
This verb phrase is formed by the verb ir ("go") followed by the preposition a and the main verb in the infinitive. This is akin to the English phrase going to + infinitive verb. For example:
Creo que descansare un poco Creo que voy a descansar un poco
Manana me visitara mi madre Manana me va a visitar mi madre
Ire a visitarla manana Voy a ir a visitarla manana
See also
Voseo
Lunfardo, Buenos Aires slang argot
Spanish dialects and varieties
Immigration in Argentina
External links
Argentine Spanish Slang Dictionary
Learn Spanish with Argentina speakers
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Rioplatense Spanish
