Rioplatense Spanish

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Rioplatense Spanish (castellano rioplatense, also occasionally termed River Plate Spanish) 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 Argentina's 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 Río de la Plata basin had its status lifted to Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1776. Until immigration to the region, the language of the Río de la Plata had virtually no influence of other languages and varied mainly by the means of localisms.

Native American languages' influence

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

Some words of American origin commonly used in Rioplatense Spanish are:

• From Quechua: alpaca, gaucho (orig. wakcha "poor person"), guanaco, llama (the animal), puma, pampa "plains, flat terrain", mate (an infusion, orig. mati "pumpkin").
• From Guaraní: caracú "bone marrow", matete "mess", chamamé, yaguareté "jaguar".
• From Tupi: capibara (largest rodent on Earth), jacarandá (a tree).
• che (Origin disputed. Usually considered a Mapuche influence meaning "man",or a Guaraní influence meaning "I" or "my" originally used as che amigo, my friend. Other hypotheses include 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 settlers and immigrants to Argentina and Uruguay:

• 1870–1890: mainly Spanish, Basque, Galician and Northern Italian speakers and some from Germany, and other European countries.
• 1910–1945: 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 great in numbers but were influential in the upper classes, industry, business, education and agriculture. This influenced a respect for English customs and language.

Latin American immigration

Argentina has also seen immigration from neighboring countries, notably , Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Uruguay, Brazil 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

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, andate. Yo no te voy a parar.

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

/sikeˌɾɛˈhite anˈdate - ʃo noteβjapaˈɾa/ [(listen)]

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. [link]

According to a study conducted by National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina, and published in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (ISSN 1366-7289)[link] 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 Italian immigration. Before that, the porteño accent was more similar to that of Spain, especially Andalusia. [link]

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:

Inflection of amar

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 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 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:

Inflection of perder

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 (less used) 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 was still used in Catholic liturgy to address the deity up to the Second Vatican Council). In Rioplatense, as in most other dialects which employ voseo, this pronoun has become informal (compare thou in English). 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 me visitará mi madre → Mañana me va a visitar mi madre
• Iré a visitarla mañana → Voy a ir a visitarla mañana

The Rioplatense speaker rarely uses the perfect past tense (choosing simple past over it), so past tense phrases rarely are of the form Una vez he ido a comer a ese restaurante. The form Una vez fui a comer a ese restaurante would be chosen.

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)

 

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