By Tom Thompson
No matter what, Spanish in and around Buenos Aires can be a challenge for the non-native speaker. An initial challenge for me is that the pronunciation of yo becomes sho and ll moves from a y sound to a sh sound. And then there's Lunfardo, a vocabulary of 5,000 or so words that are peppered throughout the local Spanish, mostly developed as a product of European, mostly Italian, immigration to Argentina that took place from the late 1800s through the mid-1990s. Lunfardo was born out of a need to communicate among people who had different regional dialects of their respective languages, mostly Spanish and Italian.
Since the early 20th century, Lunfardo has spread among all social strata and classes by habitual use, or perhaps because it was common in the lyrics of tango. It seems that Lunfardo comes from the word lumbardo (the inhabitants of the region of Lombardia in Italy). Lunfardo now has become synonymous with the speech of Buenos Aires, or Porteño. Lunfardo words are inserted in the normal flow of Porteño Spanish sentences, but grammar and pronunciation do not change.
Lunfardo uses metaphors. Ventana (window) is used for “eye.” Mango is a peso. Trucho or trucha means trout, but it is used to describe something of poor or bad quality, even something fake. Chamuyero is a smooth talking “con-man.” Chetola is used to describe something that is snobby because it is exclusive or expensive. Che is possibly the most famous Lunfardo expression and is used to say “Hey, you,” or Hey, where are you going?” Tumbero, a slang term for “convict” originates from the word tumba meaning grave.
There's a Lunfardo tradition of disguising a word from the standard language by the displacement of its syllables. That special feature of Lunfardo is its use of word play, notably vesre (from [al]revés), reversing the syllables so that tango becomes gotán and café con leche becomes feca con chele. Gomias for amigos, “friends.” Jermu for mujer, “woman.” Chochamu, is vesre for muchacho, or young man. Garpar is vesre for pagar, “to pay.” Vesre is sometimes likened to Pig Latin.
Lunfardo was clearly influenced by Cocolinche, a dialect of Italian immigrants. Manyar (to eat), mina (girl), matina (morning), and fiaca (lazy) are easy examples.
Lunfardo also uses words that are derived from others in Spanish, such as the verb abarajar, meaning to stop a situation or a person. Other words come from Afro roots, tango, milonga, mango, tamaco, chambón. Then there are sometimes random additions of suffixes, with no particular meaning, making common words sound like Italian surnames. Endings might include -etti, -elli, eli, -oni, -eni, or -anga, among others.
To the frustration of an etymologist the source of much of the word stock cannot be easily discovered. But everybody agrees that Lunfardo was once the idiom of the underworld, deliberately coined to serve as a secret language which would be unintelligible to the uninitiated.
These days in Argentina any neologism that has reached even minimum acceptance is considered by default a Lunfardo term. Most fascinating to me is the use of Lunfardo in tango lyrics. “Milonga Lunfarda” by Edmundo Rivero is my favorite. An average Spanish-speaking person typically needs help with a few words.
Tom Thompson writes frequently on foreign language topics. He lives in Washington, D.C.
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