The language spoken in Argentina is Spanish, the first language of almost all of its roughly 46 million people. Argentina's constitution names no official language, but Spanish is used in government, schools and the media. The Argentine variety, Rioplatense Spanish, is one of the most distinctive in the world: Argentines say vos instead of tú, pronounce "ll" and "y" like "sh", and speak with an intonation often compared to Italian. Several Indigenous languages are also spoken, including Guaraní, which is co-official in Corrientes province, as well as Quechua and Mapudungun, and there are immigrant languages such as Welsh in Patagonia.
How Argentines Sound
Three features make Argentine Spanish recognisable within a sentence.
The first is voseo. For the informal "you", Argentines use vos, with its own verb forms: vos sos ("you are") instead of tú eres, vos tenés instead of tú tienes, and commands such as vení ("come") and decime ("tell me"). Voseo is used in parts of Central America and in Uruguay and Paraguay too, but Argentina uses it everywhere, from street talk to advertising, television and government campaigns, which sets it apart. Tú sounds foreign to most Argentines.
The second is the "sh" sound. Where most Spanish speakers pronounce "ll" and "y" as a "y" sound, speakers from Buenos Aires say something close to English "zh" or "sh". So calle (street) sounds like "ca-she", yo ("I") like "sho" and playa ("beach") like "pla-sha". Linguists call this sheísmo. Older speakers voiced it as "zh", but over the second half of the twentieth century younger people shifted to the voiceless "sh", a rare example of a sound change that can be watched happening across generations.
The third is the melody. Porteño speech, that of Buenos Aires, rises and falls in a way that Spanish speakers elsewhere often describe as Italian. Studies of Buenos Aires intonation have found real similarities with southern Italian dialects, especially Neapolitan, which fits the city's history.
Why Buenos Aires Kept Vos
Vos was once used across the Spanish-speaking world as an informal "you". In Spain and in the great colonial centres of Mexico City and Lima, where the viceroys' courts followed the speech of Madrid, it gave way to tú from the sixteenth century onwards. Buenos Aires was far from those courts. For most of the colonial period it was a small smuggling port at the edge of the empire, and it became the capital of a viceroyalty only in 1776. Its speech was left to develop on its own, and vos survived there and in other outlying regions while it disappeared from the centres. Like every variety in the Americas, Argentine Spanish also has seseo: the "c" in cena and the "z" in zapato are pronounced as "s", never as the "th" of central Spain.
A Language Remade by Immigration
Between about 1880 and 1930 Argentina received one of the largest immigration waves in modern history, millions of Europeans, most of them Italians and Spaniards, who came to farm the pampas and work in its ports and cities. By the 1914 census about 30 per cent of Argentina's population had been born abroad, and in Buenos Aires the figure was close to half. A majority of Argentines today are commonly estimated to have at least some Italian ancestry.
Italian immigrants did not keep their language for long. Most learned Spanish within a generation, and Italian-language newspapers and schools declined in the twentieth century. But the transition left traces. Newcomers first spoke cocoliche, a mixed Italian–Spanish speech. It became famous through a comic character in popular theatre and circus of the late nineteenth century and is remembered now mainly for the rhythms and words it left behind. Everyday words from Italian include laburo (work, from lavoro), chau (goodbye, from ciao) and birra (beer). The Argentine habit of eating gnocchi, ñoquis, on the 29th of every month, with a banknote under the plate for luck, is a custom of Italian immigrant origin.
Lunfardo: The Slang of Buenos Aires
Out of the crowded tenements and ports of late-nineteenth-century Buenos Aires grew lunfardo, a slang that mixed Spanish with Italian dialects, Portuguese, African and Indigenous words. It began as the speech of the city's underworld and spread through the lyrics of tango, which carried it into the mainstream. Many tango songs from the 1920s onward are written largely in lunfardo.
Much of it is still everyday Argentine Spanish. Mina means a woman, pibe a kid, guita money, morfar to eat, and bondi a bus, probably from the Brazilian Portuguese word for a tram. Quilombo, a mess or chaos, originally meant a brothel and before that a settlement of runaway slaves, from the Kimbundu language of Angola. Lunfardo also has vesre, the habit of swapping syllables around, so that café becomes feca, pagar ("to pay") becomes garpar and amigo becomes gomía. An Academia Porteña del Lunfardo, founded in 1962, studies and documents it.
Then there is che, used constantly to catch someone's attention, much like "hey" or "mate". Its origin is disputed. Some trace it to Guaraní, others to Valencian Spanish. It is familiar worldwide because Argentines used it so often that Cuban revolutionaries gave the Argentine-born Ernesto Guevara the nickname "Che".
Different Accents Across the Country
Rioplatense Spanish, spoken around Buenos Aires and shared with Uruguay across the River Plate, is what most outsiders think of as Argentine, but the country has several regional accents. In Córdoba, speakers stretch the syllable before the stressed one in a sing-song tonada that other Argentines imitate affectionately. In the north-west, near Bolivia, speech is slower and pronounces "rr" with a hissing sound shared with the Andes. The Cuyo region around Mendoza sounds closer to neighbouring Chile, and in the north-east, Corrientes and Misiones Spanish is shaped by Guaraní. Most of these regions keep voseo, but not all of them use the Buenos Aires "sh". A comparison with the Spanish across the Andes is in our guide to the language spoken in Chile.
Guaraní, Quichua and Mapudungun
In the 2022 census about 1.3 million people, roughly 3 per cent of the population, identified as Indigenous or of Indigenous descent, though far fewer speak an Indigenous language. Guaraní is the most widely spoken. It has been co-official alongside Spanish in Corrientes province since 2004 and is common in Misiones, reflecting the region's ties with Paraguay. A distinctive variety of Quechua, Quichua santiagueño, is spoken by tens of thousands of people in Santiago del Estero, far from the Andes where Quechua is usually found. Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche, is spoken in Patagonia on both sides of the Chilean border. In the Gran Chaco, peoples such as the Qom (Toba), Wichí and Moqoit keep their languages, and Chaco province made three of them official in 2010.
Welsh in Patagonia and Other Immigrant Languages
The most surprising language in Argentina is Welsh. In 1865 about 150 Welsh settlers sailed on the Mimosa to found a colony in the Chubut valley of Patagonia, hoping to preserve their language and religion away from English influence. They survived early hunger with help from the local Tehuelche people and dug irrigation channels that turned the dry lower Chubut valley into farmland. Towns such as Gaiman, Trelew and Trevelin still have Welsh chapels and tea houses, and Welsh is still spoken by a few thousand people. Since 1997, teachers from Wales have taught it in local schools, and the annual Eisteddfod festival still takes place there.
Other communities also kept their languages. German is spoken in towns such as Villa General Belgrano in Córdoba and among Mennonite farmers in La Pampa, who speak Plautdietsch, a Low German dialect. English survives among the Anglo-Argentine community whose ancestors built the railways and estancias, and in the polo clubs and schools they founded. Arabic, Yiddish, Japanese, Korean and, more recently, Chinese have communities of their own, mainly in Buenos Aires. Argentine Sign Language is used by the country's deaf community.
Words a Visitor Needs
Learners who studied Spanish from Spain meet a different vocabulary in Argentina. There is no vosotros; the plural "you" is always ustedes. A bus is a colectivo, a pavement a vereda, a swimming pool a pileta and a strawberry a frutilla. Several everyday food words come from Quechua, the language of the Inca empire, which reached into north-western Argentina: palta for avocado, choclo for corn and zapallo for squash. And the verb coger, which in Spain simply means "to take" or "to catch", is vulgar in Argentina, so visitors who announce they will coger el autobús tend to get a laugh. Argentines say tomar el colectivo instead.
Spanish in Schools and on Screen
Argentine schools teach standard written Spanish, but with vos, not tú, so textbooks, road signs and official campaigns all use the local forms. That is a matter of national identity. Through the twentieth century Argentine film, tango and literature, from Jorge Luis Borges to Julio Cortázar, made Rioplatense Spanish one of the most prestigious varieties of the language. Argentina is one of more than twenty countries where Spanish is an official or main language, as our list of Spanish-speaking countries shows, and its variety is instantly recognisable in all of them.