Lunfardo

Areas where "Lunfardo" developed in the XIX century

Lunfardo is a dialect originated and developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the lower classes (of mainly Italian immigrants[1] ) in Buenos Aires and the surrounding Gran Buenos Aires,[2][3] and from there spread to other cities nearby, such as Rosario, Asunción 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 the Spanish of Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. Nevertheless, since the early 20th century, Lunfardo has spread among all social strata and classes, either by habitual use or because it was common in the lyrics of tango.

Origin

Lunfardo (or briefly, lunfa) began as prison slang in the late 19th century, so guards would not understand the prisoners. According to Oscar Conte, the word came from "lumbardo" (the inhabitants of the region Lombardia in Italy, from where came most of the Italians in Argentina in the early XIX century).[4]

Etymology

Most sources believe that Lunfardo originated among criminals, and later became more commonly used by other classes. Circa 1870, the word lunfardo itself (originally a deformation of lombardo in several Italian dialects) was often used to mean "outlaw".

Lunfardo today

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" or "Porteño", mainly of the inhabitants of the City of Buenos Aires, and its surrounding areas (Greater Buenos Aires). The Montevideo speech has almost as much "lunfardo slang" as the Buenos Aires speech. Conde thinks that the lunfardo -like the cocoliche- can be considered a kind of Italian dialect mixed with spanish words, mainly the one spoken in Montevideo: in simple words for him the lunfardo is interlanguage variety of the italian dialects spoken by immigrants in the areas of Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

In Argentina, neologisms that have reached a minimum level of acceptance are considered a Lunfardo term. The original slang has been immortalized in numerous tango lyrics.

Conde thinks that the lunfardo is not a dialect, but a kind of local language of the Italian immuigrants, mixed with Spanish and some French words.[5] He believes that lunfardo is not a slang of the criminals, because most of the lunfardo words are not related to crime.[6]

Conde defines lunfardo as:

(Lunfardo) is a form of popular expression, or better, a vocabulary of the poors in Buenos Aires that grew to all the area of the Rio de la Plata and later to all the country...The use of this lexicus remembers to the users their roots and their identity....the lunfardo is probably the only one created mostly from Italian immigrants words (Es un modo de expresión popular o, para decirlo más claramente, un vocabulario del habla popular de Buenos Aires…que se ha extendido primero a toda la región del Río de la Plata y luego al país entero…el uso de este léxico les recuerda a sus usuarios quiénes son, pero también de dónde vienen…el lunfardo es posiblemente el único que en su origen se formó, y en un alto porcentaje, con términos italianos inmigrados).[7]

Characteristics

Lunfardo words are inserted in the normal flow of Rioplatense Spanish sentences – grammar and pronunciation do not change. Thus, an average Spanish-speaking person reading tango lyrics will need, at most, the translation of a discrete set of words.

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 back slang, French verlan or Greek ποδανά-podaná. 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.

Examples

Nouns

Verbs

Modern slang

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.

Influence from Cocoliche

Many Cocoliche (an Italian immigrants dialect of the port of Buenos Aires) words were transferred to the Lunfardo in the first half of the XX century. For example:

Suffixes

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.

See also

Notes

  1. Cocoliche e Lunfardo: l'italiano dell'Argentina (in Italian)
  2. Lunfardo history, with historical accounts in newspapers of the nineteenth century.
  3. Definition of the word "Lunfardo"according to the RAE.
  4. Conde. "Un estudio sobre el habla popular de los argentinos". Introduction
  5. Oscar Conde: Lunfardo. Un estudio sobre el habla popular de los argentinos; pág. 43
  6. Conde; p. 55
  7. Conde; p. 109
  8. pibe in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española

Bibliography

External links