Rioplatense Spanish

Rioplatense Spanish (español rioplatense) is a dialect of the Spanish language which is mainly spoken in the areas in and around the Río de la Plata basin, in Argentina and Uruguay.

Location

Rioplatense is mainly centered around the cities of Buenos Aires, Rosario and Montevideo, the three most populated cities in the area, along with their respective suburbs and the areas in between. The dialect is also found in other areas, not geographically close but culturally influenced by those population centers.

Rioplatense is the standard in the audiovisual media, due to its prevalence in the capital, where the most important media conglomerates are based. However, it is not as common in other large areas of Argentina, such as the province of Mendoza, which is heavily influenced by Chilean dialects, or in the province of Córdoba, which has a dialect with a heavily marked intonation, even while next to the provinces of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe.

Meanwhile, cities further away like Bariloche (also near Chile) and Ushuaia (in the southernmost part of the country) speak Rioplatense Spanish, probably due to the influence of nation-wide television broadcasting from Buenos Aires. The south of Argentina was colonised more recently from Buenos Aires or directly from Europe, whereas the provinces to the north have long-established Spanish-speaking communities with their own accents and dialects.

Influences on the language

The adoption of the Spanish language in the area was caused by the Spanish colonization in the region. Part of the Viceroyalty of Peru, the Rio de la Plata basin had its status lifted to Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1776. Until immigration to Argentina, the language of the region had virtually no influence of other languages and varied mainly by the means of localisms.

Middle Eastern and Asian Immigration

Although relatively recent immigrants, people from Asia and the Middle East could influence the region in the future, if not already doing so.

• Immigration in the 1830s by Syrians and Lebanese, mainly Muslims
• Japanese immigration after World War II, mainly from Okinawa
• Korean, mainly in the 1970s
• Chinese immigration, which also started in the 1970s, began increasing in the 1990s

Native American languages' influence

Native American languages have been largely influenced or even wiped out by Spanish language in the area, but some Native American words have also entered into the Spanish of the region, and even reached English.

• cóndor (from Quechua, "condor")
• mate (an infusion, from Quechua's mati, "pumpkin")
• pampa (Quechua, "plains, flat terrain")
• che (Guaraní for "I" or "my", originally used as che amigo "my friend").

European immigration

Several languages influenced the criollo Spanish of the time, because of the diversity of immigrants to Argentina:

• 1870-1890: mainly Spanish, Basque, Galician and Italian speakers and some from Germany, Yugoslavia and other European countries
• 1910-1945: Again from Spain, 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 great in numbers but were an influential set in industry, business, education and agriculture, figuring importantly in high society. This influenced a respect for English customs and language.

Latin American immigration

Argentina has also seen immigration from neighbouring countries, notably Bolivia, Peru and Uruguay and in smaller numbers from Brazil, Chile and Paraguay.

They have provided slang words like bondi (meaning bus in Argentina, from Brazilian Portuguese "bondi", meaning trolley), as well as other Native American- and criollo-derived words.

Linguistic features

Phonology

Rioplatense Spanish distinguishes itself from other varieties of Spanish by the pronunciation of certain consonants.

• Like many other dialects, Rioplatense features yeísmo: the sounds represented by ll (the palatal lateral /ʎ/) and y (historically the palatal approximant /j/) have fused into one. This merged phoneme is generally pronounced as a postalveolar fricative, either voiceless [ʃ] or voiced [ʒ] (these are the sounds in English mission and measure, or the French ch and j, respectively). That is, in Rioplatense, se cayó "he fell down" is homophonous with se calló "he became silent".

• The fricatives /s/ and sometimes /f/ and /x/ have a tendency to become an indistinct aspiration (a voiceless glottal fricative, /h/), or to disappear altogether, at the end of syllables. This change may be realized only at the word level or it may also cross word boundaries. That is, las mesas son blancas "the tables are white" is pronounced [lah'mesah sɔn 'blankah], but in las águilas azules "the blue eagles", syllable-final /s/ in las and águilas might experience liaison with the initial vowels of the following words and remain [s] (/la'sagila sa'sulɛh/), or become [h] (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 or elision of fricatives, 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 querés irte, andáte. Yo no te voy a parar.

"If you want to go then go. I'm not gonna stop you."

/sikeˌɾɛˈhite anˈdate – ʃo noteβjapaˈɾa/

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 dialects of Spanish. [1]

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 tú. Voseo is found also in other places around the Spanish-speaking community. Vos is used with forms of the verb that resemble those of the second person plural in traditional (Spain's) Spanish.

The second person plural pronoun, which is vosotros in Spain, is replaced with ustedes. 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. Ustedes takes a grammatically third person plural verb.

¹ The tu amás form is only used in Uruguay.

Although apparently just a stress variation (from amas to amas ), the origin of such a stress is the loss of the diphthong of the ancient vos inflection from "vos amáis" to "vos amás". This can be better seen with the verb 'to be': from vos sois to vos sos.

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 descansaré un poco → Creo que voy a descansar un poco
• Mañana visitará a mi madre → Mañana va a visitar a mi madre

The Rioplatense speaker rarely uses the perfect past tense (choosing simple past over it), so past tense phrases rarely are of the form Alguna vez he ido a comer a ese restaurante. The form Alguna vez fui a comer a ese restaurante would be chosen, or even without periphrasis: Alguna vez comí en ese restaurante.

See also

• Lunfardo, Buenos Aires slang argot
• Spanish dialects and varieties