WHAT IS LUNFARDO? (By Hostel Buenos Aires)

Lunfardo is the Buenos Aires slang. A complex mixture of words coming from different languages, distortions and inversions of Spanish and spontaneous creations. Its origins set in the end of the XIX Century and the beginning of XX, with the great migrations that settled in Buenos Aires. The Lunfardo arose from that mixture and in that particular situation that they lived in our city.

By that time, according to official estimations, almost 65% of the city population came from other countries (mostly from Spain and Italy). Escaping from war, famine or poverty, thousands of Europeans found themselves in a strange country that often didn’t even share their language. With no family or any acquaintances in Argentina, they end up living in piled up in houses or hotels with several different immigrant families. From their effort to communicate and socialize, to relate with their neighbors, emerged the basis of what is nowadays known as lunfardo.

Once a tentative to communicate, as the immigrants familiarized with local Spanish, lunfardo became their own slang. They took advantage of it to make fun of the authorities and to communicate outside the official channels. Soon, the convicts adopted it to avoid the guards and security controls. Later, it would transcend social borders by being a fundamental element of tango lyrics. Nowadays, the porteños use lunfardo in everyday life. Like any other language it continues to evolve and includes new words every year.

In Argentine lunfardo you can find Italian words (“laburo”, from lavoro, work), English words (“escrachar”, from scratch, used when somebody is shown up), Portuguese, Galician, African, Indigenous and French words, among others. Its also common to find syllabic inversions in several words, something also practiced by French (i.e.: tango becomes “gotan”). If you speak Spanish and there’s a word you can’t understand in Argentina, make no mistake: that’s lunfardo.