(Note: If you haven´t done it yet, we recommend that you read the first and second part of this article, and then continue with this third and last part)
In the same manner as tango was not a creation of marginal people, despite of what has been said so often, neither was lunfardo, in my opinion. Although it’s fair to say, without being a creation of marginal people, lunfardo is from the linguistic point of view, a marginal language, in the sense that, term by term, it’s opposed to the standardized language.
So Otario as opposed to cándido(candid), morfar to comer(eat), funyi to sombrero(hat), and the same occurs with the expressions: tirar el carro as opposed to explotar prostitutas(to exploit prostitutes), estar al palo as opposed to tener una erección(to have an erection), tener calle to ser experimentado(to have experience), etc…
Sincerely I think that there is nothing wrong with lunfardo having been since its origins, an important and unavoidable part of the way of speaking of Buenos Aires. However, some people can’t or just don’t want to move away from the idea of lunfardo as a jargon of thieves, maybe with the intention of saving “the good name and honor” of that people. In this line of thought seems to go José Edmundo Clemente which in his article “El idioma de Buenos Aires” (The language of Buenos Aires) signals compulsively: “lunfardo, called by policemen jail language, is a form apart inside the popular vocabulary”.
Not a form a part, in my opinion. But the perspective of Clemente influenced other specialists (Lopez Peña or, with some nuances, Beatriz Fontanella de Weinberg and Susana Martorell), who have kept maintaining the original criminal character of lunfardo. And they base themselves in completely biased documents, like those written by Benigno Lugones or Antonio Dellepiane, that were not linguists –and, I must admit, I don’t think they pretended to be so- but a police officer the first and criminal investigator the second. Nevertheless, we must not forget that this confusion that they had has occurred in other popular ways of speaking of the world, identified in their origin –sometimes correctly (like in the case of French argot) and sometimes incorrectly- with the underworld.
To conclude and arrive at last to what I promised: The use of lunfardo, give us the porteños –and we almost could say today, all the Argentineans- a sense of belonging, and makes it possible that we feel comfortable with our speakers and that we feel even a bit like accomplices with them. Let me try out my own definition of lunfardo: it’s a lexical repertoire integrated by terms and expressions of a diverse origin used in alternation with those of the standard Spanish language and spread in all the social classes in Argentina. This vocabulary, originally made up of many immigrated terms, was used at first by the speaker of the Rio de la Plata(1) , but it spread later to all the country. Until a few years ago i added to my description that these terms and expressions –with some historical exceptions, like otario, pibe or compadrito-, were not acknowledged in the standard Spanish dictionaries. It’s not like that anymore. The dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language has introduced in its latest edition several dozens of terms of the current lunfardo, like berreta, falopa, desbole, grasa, tortillera or ñoqui.
However, their inclusion in the academic dictionary cannot modify in any way their innate condition of lunfardisms.
Oscar Conde.
(1)When i refer to the region of the Rio de la Plata we include the whole of the province of Buenos Aires(with the cities of Buenos Aires and La Plataand their respective influence zones), the south of Entre Ríos and Santa Fe(with the city of Rosario) and the urban zone of Uruguay(with the city of Montevideo)
