Regarding the origin of lunfardo there are a lot of fantasies. The biggest nonsense –maintained even by the author of a recent dictionary- is that lunfardo is a language. Since the XIX century there has been who pretended the existence of a national language. The thesis, inspired by Juan María Gutierrez, was defended in 1900 by the frenchman Luciano Abeille, that published in Paris a book called precisely The National Language of the argentines, where he proposed some sort of mix between spanish and the indigenous languages, french, italian and to a lesser extent english and german. Some sort of delirious neo-esperanto. It’s true that Abeille didn’t take into account the lunfardo, but he did advocate the use of popular terms and expressions that in those times horrified other defenders of the thesis, like Mariano de Vedia.

It’s out of the question that lunfardo is not a language. It is not because you can’t speak completely in lunfardo”, it is clear that the most that somebody could say is “to speak with lunfardo”. lunfardo, as you can speak in quichua, in guaraní or in portuguese. And this is because inside lunfardo there aren’t nor pronouns, nor prepositions, nor conjunctions, and it practically lacks also of adverbs and because –this is the most important point- lunfardo uses the morphologic mechanisms of spanish for the conjugation of verbs and the inflection of nouns and adjectives and makes use of the same spanish syntax that we study in school. No matter how common is to say “to speak in lunfardo”, it is clear that the most that somebody could say is “to speak with lunfardo”.

It’s not a dialect either, because a dialect is a regional variety of a language. It’s obvious that there is a Rio de la Plata or porteño dialect of the spanish, but that implies the junction of different elements apart from those that belong to the lexical field: certain phonetics –a certain way of pronouncing the “s”, the “c” and the “y”, etc…-, the existence of alternative pronouns of the second person(“vos” and “ustedes”), that are different from the pronouns of the standard spanish(“tú” and “vosotros”), the resulting verbal agreement with this pronouns –“vos podés” and not “vos puedes”); “ustedes saben” and not “ustedes sabéis”-. It’s true also that a dialect is recognized by its terms and, in any case, it could be said that lunfardo is one more element among all that characterize this dialect of Buenos Aires. But in the lexical level there are furthermore other matters to take into account that have nothing to do with lunfardo. Speakers of a dialect select, from all the lexemes that make up the language, some in particular that are not the same the speakers of that language in other regions. For example, a speaker of the dialect from the Rio de la Plata calls “frutilla”(strawberry) to what a spanish speaker from the Iberian Peninsula calls “fresa”, or “subterraneo” to what the second calls “metro”.

Oscar Conde

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