Луфардо: Арго Буэнос-Айреса

Argot of Buenos Aires, Argentina

Lunfardo (lunˈfaɾðo; from the Italian lombardo or inhabitant of Lombardy, lumbard in Lombard) is an argot originated and developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the lower classes in the Río de la Plata region (encompassing the port cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo) and from there spread to other urban areas nearby, such as the Greater Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and Rosario. Lunfardo originated from the mixture of languages and dialects produced due to the massive European immigration, mainly Italian and Spanish, which arrived in the ports of the region since the end of the 19th century. It was originally 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 in 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. Today, the meaning of the term lunfardo has been extended to designate any slang or jargon used in Buenos Aires.

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 20th 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.

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 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 –Lunfardo for "The Hobo" or "The Bum"– 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, Serbo Croatian Šatrovački or Greek podaná. Thus, tango becomes gotán and café (coffee) becomes feca. 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.

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, for no particular reason, but playful language. These endings include etti, elli eli, oni, eni, anga, ango, enga, engue, engo, ingui, ongo, usi, ula, usa, eta, among others. Examples: milanesa (meat dish) milanga, cuaderno ("notebook") cuadernelli, etc.