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Lunfardo (from the Italian lumbardo or inhabitant of Lombardy in the local dialect) is a slang originated and developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the lower classes in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the surrounding area Greater Buenos Aires, and from there spread to other cities nearby, such as Rosario, places with similar socio-cultural situations.
Contents
- Origin
- Etymology
- Lunfardo today
- Characteristics
- Nouns
- Verbs
- Modern slang
- Influence from Cocoliche
- Suffixes
- References
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, and Uruguay. Nevertheless, since the early 20th century, Lunfardo has spread among all social strata and classes by habitual use or because it was common in the lyrics of tango.
Origin
Lunfardo (or lunfa for short) began as prison slang in the late 19th century so guards would not understand prisoners. According to Oscar Conde, the word came from "lumbardo" (the inhabitants of the region Lombardia in Italy, the origin of most of the Italians in Argentina in the early 19th century). However, the vernacular Spanish of mid-19th century Buenos Aires as preserved in the dialogue of Esteban Echeverría's short story The Slaughter Yard (El matadero) is already a prototype of Lunfardo.
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, although 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 synonymous with "speech of Buenos Aires" or "Porteño", mainly of the inhabitants of the City of Buenos Aires, as well as its surrounding areas, Greater Buenos Aires. The Montevideo speech has almost as much "lunfardo slang" as the Buenos Aires speech. Conde says the lunfardo (much like the cocoliche) can be considered a kind of Italian dialect mixed with Spanish words, specifically the one spoken in Montevideo. In other words, the lunfardo is an interlanguage variety of the Italian dialects spoken by immigrants in the areas of Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
In Argentina, any neologism that reached a minimum level of acceptance is considered, by default, a Lunfardo term. The original slang has been immortalized in numerous tango lyrics.
Conde has expressed that the Lunfardo is not so much a dialect but a kind of local language of the Italian immigrants, mixed with Spanish and some French words. He believes that Lunfardo is not a criminal slang, since most of the lunfardo words are not related to crime.
According to Conde, Lunfardo
...is a vernacular, or to put it more clearly, is a vocabulary of popular speech in Buenos Aires that spread first throughout the River Plate area and later to the whole country ... The use of this lexicon reminds speakers of their identity but also of their roots... lunfardo is possibly the only argot that was originally formed, and in great measure, from Italian immigrant terms. [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].
Characteristics
Lunfardo words are inserted in the normal flow of Rioplatense Spanish sentences, but 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 (such as 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.
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
Lunfardo was influenced by Cocoliche, a dialect of Italian immigrants. Many cocoliche words were transferred to Lunfardo in the first half of the 20th century. For example:-
Some Italian linguists, because of the Cocoliche influences, argue that the Lunfardo can be considered a pidgin of the Italian language.
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.