Rioplatense Spanish
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Rioplatense Spanish (castellano rioplatense) is a dialect of the Spanish language which is mainly spoken in the areas in and around the River Plate basin, in Argentina and Uruguay.
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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 those cities' strong historical ties with Buenos Aires (especially Ushuaia, whose industrial base has a large majority of uprooted workers 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 River Plate basin had its status lifted to Viceroyalty of the River Plate 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.
- mate (an infusion, from Quechua's mati, "pumpkin")
- pampa (form Quechua's panpa, "plains, flat terrain")
- che (Origin disputed. Usually considered a Guaraní influence meaning "I" or "my", originally used as che amigo, my friend. Other hypotheses include Mapuche, Valencian and Italian language).
- See Influences on the Spanish language for a more comprehensive review of borrowings into all dialects of Spanish.
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 neighboring 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 "bonde", meaning trolley), as well as other Native American- and criollo-derived words.
Linguistic features
| Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. |
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) Castilian 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 (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:
| Person/Number | Castilian | Rioplatense |
|---|---|---|
| 1st sing. | yo amo | yo amo |
| 2nd sing. | tú amas | vos amás or tú amás¹ |
| 3rd sing. | él ama | él ama |
| 1st plural | nosotros amamos | nosotros amamos |
| 2nd plural | vosotros amáis | ustedes aman² |
| 3rd plural | ellos aman | ellos aman |
- (¹) Tú amás is only used in Uruguay. In formal speech, usted ama.
- (²) Ustedes is common to all Latin America.
Although apparently there is just a stress shift (from amas to amás), 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. In vowel-alternating verbs like perder and morir, the stress shift also triggers a change of the vowel in the root:
| Castilian | Rioplatense |
|---|---|
| yo pierdo | yo pierdo |
| tú pierdes | vos perdés or tú perdés |
| él pierde | él pierde |
| nosotros perdemos | nosotros perdemos |
| vosotros perdéis | ustedes pierden |
| ellos pierden | ellos pierden |
For the -ir verbs, the Castilian vosotros forms end in -ís, so there is no diphthong to simplify, and Rioplatense vos employs the same form: instead of tú vives, vos vivís; instead of tú vienes, vos venís (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):
- Hablá más alto, por favor. "Speak louder, please." (hablad in Castilian)
- Comé un poco de torta. "Eat some cake." (comed in Castilian)
- Vení para acá. "Come over here." (venid in Castilian)
The plural imperative uses the ustedes form (i. e. the third person plural subjunctive, as corresponding to ellos).
As for the subjunctive forms of vos verbs, while they tend to be unchanged, some speakers do perform a similar change as seen in the indicative, employing the vosotros form minus the i in the final diphthong. In the third conjugation (-ir verbs), the stress does not shift, so the result is identical for the Rioplatense speaker. Many consider only the unchanged subjunctive forms to be correct.
- Espero que veas or Espero que veás "I hope you can see" (Castilian veáis)
- Lo que quieras or Lo que querás "Whatever you want" (Castilian queráis)
- Si salieras "If you went out" (Castilian salierais)
In the preterite tense, an s is often added, for instance (vos) perdistes. This corresponds to the Spanish form vosotros perdisteis. However, it is commonly deemed incorrect.
Other verb forms do not change (the vos forms employ the same conjugation as tú).
Usage
In the old times, vos was used as a respectful term (as it still appears in Catholic liturgy to address the deity). In Rioplatense, as in most other dialects which employ voseo, this pronoun has become informal. 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 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
- Immigration in Argentina
External links
- Linguistics of Rioplatense spanish
- Argentine Slang Dictionary
- Diccionario argentino-español (in Spanish, for Spaniards)
