Lunfardo is a dialect originated and developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the lower classes in Buenos Aires and the surrounding Gran Buenos Aires[1][2], and from there spread to other cities nearby, such as Rosario and Montevideo, cities with similar socio-cultural situations. Originally, Lunfardo was a slang used by criminals and soon by other people of the lower and lower-middle classes. Later, many of its words and phrases were introduced in the vernacular and disseminated Castilian of Argentina and Uruguay. Nevertheless, since the early 20th century, Lunfardo began to spread among all social strata and classes, either by habitual use or because it was common in the lyrics of tango. During the 20th and this century many of its words have gone to neighboring countries like Chile and Paraguay, because immigrants from those countries are living in Argentina.
A few have been recognized even by the Real Academia Española. Lunfardo is, for all practical purposes, unintelligible to an average Spanish-speaking person from any other country.
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Lunfardo (or briefly, lunfa) appeared in Buenos Aires and its surroundings during the second half of the nineteenth century from the great contribution of the various waves of immigration, especially Italians, and words from American Indian, African and gaucho origin which had already existed in Argentina.
The Lunfardo language began as prison slang in the late 19th century, so guards would not understand the prisoners. Many of its expressions arrived with European immigrants (mainly Italians). When there was a mixture of the Spanish and Italian in the Rio de la Plata area, cocoliche is found, from which many Lunfardo words are derived. Other words came from the typical way Gauchos speak.
The slang also includes Aboriginal words, especially from Quichua, Guaraní and Mapuche languages, and also many words from African origin, especially from the Bantu areas, such as: quilombo, mucama, mina, catinga, mondongo, candombe, etc. Lunfardo has also received contributions from France, especially the Occitan language, and from English (ex: words as espiche comes from speech, or escrachar comes from scratch), and many words which come from Galician and Portuguese.
Most sources believe that Lunfardo originated among criminals, and later became more commonly used by other classes.[3] Circa 1900, the word lunfardo itself (originally a deformation of lombardo in several Italian dialects) was used to mean "outlaw".
Today, some Lunfardo terms have entered in the language spoken all over Argentina and Uruguay, while a great number of Lunfardo words have fallen into disuse or have been modified in the era of suburbanization. Furthermore, the term "Lunfardo" has become a synonymous with "speech of Buenos Aires", mainly of the inhabitants of the City of Buenos Aires, and its surrounding areas (Greater Buenos Aires). The Montevideo speech has almost as "lunfardo slang" as the Buenos Aires speech.
In Argentina, all neologism that has reached a minimum level of acceptance is considered a Lunfardo term. The original slang has been immortalized in numerous texts of tango.
Lunfardo words are inserted in the normal flow of Rioplatense Spanish sentences. Thus, an average Spanish-speaking person reading tango lyrics will need, at most, the translation of a discrete set of words, and not a grammar guide.
Tango lyrics use lunfardo sparsely, but some songs (such as El Ciruja, or most lyrics by Celedonio Flores) employ lunfardo heavily. "Milonga Lunfarda" by Edmundo Rivero is an instructive and entertaining primer on lunfardo usage.
A characteristic of lunfardo is its use of word play, notably vesre (from "[al] revés", reversing the syllables, similar to English pig Latin). Thus, tango becomes gotán and café con leche (coffee with milk) becomes feca con chele.
Lunfardo employs metaphors such as bobo ("dumb") for the heart, who "works all day long without being paid", or bufoso ("snorter") for pistol.
Finally, there are words that are derived from others in Spanish, such as the verb abarajar, which means to stop a situation or a person (e.g. to stop your opponent's blows with the blade of your knife) and is related to the verb "barajar", which means to cut or shuffle a deck of cards.
Since the 1970s, it is a matter of debate whether newer additions to the slang of Buenos Aires qualify as lunfardo. Traditionalists argue that lunfardo must have a link to the argot of the old underworld, to tango lyrics, or to racetrack slang. Others maintain that the colloquial language of Buenos Aires is lunfardo by definition.
Some examples of modern talk:
Many new terms had spread from specific areas of the dynamic Buenos Aires cultural scene: invented by screenwriters, used around the arts-and-crafts fair in Plaza Francia, culled from the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, or created by the lyricists of cumbia villera.
A rarer feature of Porteño speech that can make it completely unintelligible is the random addition of suffixes with no particular meaning, usually making common words sound reminiscent of Italian surnames. These endings include -etti, -elli eli, -oni, -eni, -anga, -ango, -enga, -engue, -engo, -ingui, -ongo, -usi, -ula, -usa, -eta, among others.