Español rioplatense, Porteños Spanish

Many countries have Spanish as their mother tongue but besides the general understanding between them, there are different dialects in each region.

Castellano rioplatense is the name of the dialect used the areas around Rio de la Plata, in the city of Buenos Aires, Entre Ríos Province and Uruguay.

This dialect has several characteristics:

Fonetics
In the castellano rioplatense there is no sound /θ/ (that corresponds to the “z”), very common in almost all Spain. This sound is replaced by /s/. For example: “zapato” is pronounced /sapato/.

The consonants “ll” and the “y” are pronounced with/ ʒ / or / ∫ /. For example: “lluvia” is pronounced like /shuvia/ and “ayer” is pronounced as /asher/.

Related to phonetics is intonation. The “porteños” (people born in the city of Buenos Aires) have a special intonation that can be compared to the one of the Italians. It is much more melodic than the Spanish from Spain.

Personal pronouns

• The use of “vos” as the second person singular instead of “tú”.
• The use of “ustedes” as the second person plural instead of “vosotros”.

Verb conjugation

• Voseo. Besides the use of the personal pronoun “vos”, the castellano rioplatense presents a different verbal flexion in some verb tenses.

The present tense suffers changes in the regular and irregular verbs.

Regular verbs

Irregular verbs

Imperative

Use of Verb tenses

• The use of the simple preterit (“Viajé”) instead of the compound preterit (“He viajado”).
• The use of verbal phrase (“Voy a viajar”) instead of the simple future (“Viajaré”).

The vocabulary
Our Spanish has received the influence of different languages. This produced a multiplicity of vocabulary related to a wide range of themes. Our vocabulary has been enriched by words from native cultures, from dialects of neighboring countries, from other countries from Europe like French and English and last but least from Italian.

Lunfardo is part of our vocabulary. It is an argot born from a dialect created at the beginning of the 20th century with the arrival of millions of immigrants. Nowadays many of those words have been incorporated in our daily language. Some examples:

Lorena Hebe Sinso
Buespanish School is a Spanish School in Argentina that offers Spanish courses in Buenos Aires for foreigners.
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