Learn Spanish from a course and you learn tú hablas. Land in Buenos Aires and nobody says it.
Rioplatense Spanish, spoken in Argentina and Uruguay and by around fifty million people, has a different second person, a different conjugation to go with it, a distinctive pronunciation of two common letters and an intonation that arrived from Naples. None of it is slang. All of it is the standard, taught in schools and printed in newspapers.
Voseo, which is the big one
vos: the informal you, replacing tú entirely. Not archaic, not regional-rustic, simply what people say.
It brings its own conjugation, and the pattern is regular and quick to learn. The stress moves to the final syllable and the diphthong of the tú form disappears.
vos sos: you are. Standard tú eres.
vos tenés: you have. Standard tú tienes.
vos podés: you can. Standard tú puedes.
vos querés: you want. Standard tú quieres.
The imperative loses its irregularity too, which makes it easier rather than harder: vení for ven, mirá for mira, decime for dime, tené for ten.
Note that the object pronoun stays te, so it is te digo and decime, not anything new. And the plural is ustedes, as it is throughout Latin America, so vosotros does not appear at all.
The sound that gives it away
el yeísmo rehilado: pronouncing y and ll as a sh or a zh. Yo becomes sho. Calle becomes cashe. Lluvia becomes shuvia.
This one feature identifies the accent within two words, anywhere in the world. It is not stigmatised and not informal; presidents and newsreaders do it.
The Italian layer
Between 1880 and 1930, Argentina received one of the largest immigration waves in modern history, and a very large share of it was Italian. Buenos Aires absorbed the intonation, which is why Rioplatense rises and falls in a way no other Spanish does, and absorbed the vocabulary wholesale.
laburar, fiaca, morfar and the rest of that lexicon are covered in the article on hidden slang, along with vesre, the syllable inversion that gave Buenos Aires feca for café.
che: the vocative particle that is practically the national brand. Roughly hey or mate, used to open a sentence or to hold someone's attention. Guevara acquired his nickname from saying it constantly.
The current vocabulary
re: an intensifier placed before almost anything. Re bueno, re copado, re difícil. Extremely productive and the fastest way to sound current.
copado: cool, great. Zarpado is the stronger version.
bondi: the bus, with the Brazilian etymology traced in the slang opener.
quilombo: a mess, a shambles. Domestic or political, and used constantly for both.
chamuyo: smooth talk, patter, the art of talking someone round. Chamuyar is the verb and it is not entirely an insult.
la joda: the party, the fun, the going-out. Salir de joda.
boludo: covered at length, with its regional dangers, in the article on words that travel badly. Between porteños it is punctuation. Anywhere else it is an insult.
Uruguay, briefly
Montevideo shares the voseo, the sh sound and most of the lexicon. The differences are small and mostly in the further reaches of slang, plus the fact that Uruguay drinks mate more visibly than Argentina does and has a vocabulary around it.
el mate / la bombilla / cebar: the drink, the metal straw, and the verb for preparing and passing it. Learn these three before your first afternoon in either country, because you will be handed one within an hour.
What a learner should actually do
If you are going to Argentina or Uruguay, learn the voseo. It takes an afternoon, the conjugation is more regular than the one you already know, and using tú marks you permanently as someone who learned Spanish somewhere else and has not adjusted.
If you are not going, learn to recognise it. Argentine film, football and music are exported widely, and vos sos will otherwise read as an error every time you meet it.
How to learn it
Rewrite sentences you already know. Take ten tú sentences from your notes and convert them. The pattern installs itself in an hour and then the rest is vocabulary.
Give Translate the whole line. Voseo forms plus lunfardo defeat single-word lookup, and reconstruct easily from a sentence.
Then let repetition do the vocabulary. The grammar is one afternoon; the fifty words of current porteño slang are a fortnight.
The short version
Learn vos sos, vos tenés, vení and mirá. Expect y and ll to sound like sh. Learn che, re and quilombo.
And when someone hands you a mate, do not stir it with the bombilla. That is the one mistake the vocabulary will not save you from.
Heard a conjugation that was not in your book? Put the sentence into Vokabulo. Free to start on iPhone, iPad and in the browser. 🇦🇷
