What is Lunfardo, and where do its Buenos Aires words come from?

Lunfardo: the words of immigrant Buenos Aires

El lunfardo

c. 1870–1920. Between 1855 and 1914 Buenos Aires grew from 92,000 to 1.6 million people, and more than two million Italians arrived in Argentina before 1920; in 1895 almost…

Where: Río de la Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Uruguay, Italy

What happened

Between 1855 and 1914 Buenos Aires grew from 92,000 to 1.6 million people, and more than two million Italians arrived in Argentina before 1920; in 1895 almost a third of the city was Italian-born. Out of the tenements (conventillos) of La Boca came two things: cocoliche, the broken Spanish of the immigrants themselves, and lunfardo, the vocabulary their children and the city's compadritos built from Genoese, Lombard, Neapolitan, Sicilian and Italian underworld slang, mixed with gaucho words, French, Quechua and vesre (syllable-reversal: tango becomes gotán). Because the word lunfardo once meant 'thief' and its first students were police criminologists, it was long taken for a criminal jargon; the scholar José Gobello showed it was simply popular speech, spread by tango lyrics from Mi noche triste (1917) onwards.

Say it

En Buenos Aires, 'laburo' significa trabajo y 'mina' significa mujer.

In Buenos Aires, 'laburo' means work and 'mina' means woman.

Why it matters

Lunfardo is the clearest case of immigration remaking a Spanish dialect; it is why Buenos Aires Spanish sounds Italian and why tango needs a glossary.

Read about it

Culture

Connected

Sources

  1. El lunfardo y el cocoliche (Oscar Conde, conferencia, Università di Parma, 2009) — Università degli Studi di Parma (Lingue)
  2. La pervivencia de los italianismos en el español rioplatense (Oscar Conde) — Hispadoc (Universidad de Lanús / Academia Porteña del Lunfardo)