AUDAZ REVISTA
The Buenos Aires accent is younger than it sounds
Porteños say calle as ca-she. That sound is not old Spanish. It finished changing inside a single lifetime.
THE SOUND
Calle becomes ca-she
In Buenos Aires, every ll and every y turns into the sh of the English word ship. Ella becomes e-sha. Desayuno becomes de-sa-shu-no.
Linguists call it sheísmo. It is the third step in a chain that began with yeísmo.
THE EVIDENCE
Eleven porteños read Mafalda out loud
In June 2007, Charles B. Chang recorded eleven native speakers reading comic strips containing 41 instances of the sound, then measured how often each one used the sh.
The result split the room by birth year and by nothing else.
THE GAP
0 percent against 100 percent
A man born in 1938 never used the sound once. A woman born in 1986 used it every single time. They lived in the same city.
The speaker born in 1928 managed 4.9 percent. Every speaker born after 1975 was between 95 and 100 percent.
THE FINDING
Age explained over 90 percent of it
Chang ran the statistics. Age alone accounted for upwards of 90 percent of the variance. Gender did not improve the model. Neither did the neighbourhood people grew up in.
His conclusion: a change from voiced to voiceless is already complete.
WHO STARTED IT
Young women, in the late 1940s
María Beatriz Fontanella de Weinberg studied 60 speakers in one Buenos Aires neighbourhood in 1978. Devoicing began among young women, college-educated ones in particular, then spread.
Vladimir Honsa placed the shift between the years 1946 and 1949.
THE MELODY
It sounds Italian because it partly is
Colantoni and Gurlekian found Buenos Aires Spanish places its pitch peaks early, where other Spanish varieties place them late.
Those patterns emerged at the turn of the twentieth century and coincided with the peak of Italian immigration. Between 1881 and 1914, about two million Italians settled in Argentina.
THE WORDS
Laburo, fiaca, gamba, pibe
Lunfardo, the city's slang, came off the same ships. Laburo is a job, from Italian lavorare. Fiaca is having no energy, from Italian fiacca. Gamba is a leg. Pibe is a kid.
And lunfardo plays games. Reverse the syllables and tango becomes gotán, café becomes feca, amigos becomes gomías.
THE VERDICT
Learn to understand it, do not copy it
The substitution is consistent, so you can decode a porteño in an afternoon. Imitating the accent without the rhythm underneath makes you sound more foreign, not less.
Tap through for the full breakdown, the speaker table and the lunfardo glossary.