La lingua no es franca

My brain is ajostle with languages. Spanish has to fight hard to be noticed, let alone used. And Buenos Aires Spanish does not exactly elbow for position. With a big city's indifference to accommodation, it speaks a Spanish just far enough from the norm to keep strangers at a remove.

To the casual ear, the Buenos Aires dialect, with its swoop and lilt, sounds more Italian than Spanish, as befits the population here. It's pleasing to the ear in a way that some pocketa-pocketa Spanish is not.

But it can be confounding. For Americans, Spanish has always been billed as "the accessible foreign language." It's the one where all the letters are supposed to sound out, and, if you can master the trilling "r," you're set.

Not so fast.

Porteno Spanish drops the "s" at the ends of many words, thus eliding them with the next word. And in place of the "y" sound associated with "y" and "ll" in much of the Spanish-speaking world, it uses "szh," kind of a cross between an "sh" and a "j." "Ayuda" becomes "aszhuda." "Calle" becomes "caszhay." "Me llamo Johanna" becomes "me szhamo Johanna."

On one of my first days here, I was told that what I was seeking was on the corner of such-and-such street and "Szhatay," I consulted my map and gradually realized that the letters I was seeking would have to be re-imagined based on Porteno phonetic rules. Eventually, I found the street: Yatay. Of course. How silly of me. I realized then that all the "y" and "ll" words in my small Spanish vocabulary needed to be relearned if I were to hope to understand anything said to me.

In any case, I'm barely scraping the linguistic surface. Here's an interesting overview from infoplease.com:

"A fourth type of Spanish has developed in and around Buenos Aires and in parts of Uruguay. It is characterized by some out-of-date grammar, and a vocabulary and pronunciation heavily influenced by Italians who settled the area in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Generally in the Spanish world "tú" is the singular way of saying "you." In Buenos Aires, however, "vos" is used instead. It is accompanied by a modified old Spanish verb form. It is as if part of the English-speaking world still used "thee" and "thou" in everyday speech. .... The Buenos Aires accent is instantly recognizable throughout the Spanish world. Gaucho poetry and twentieth-century Buenos Aires novelists have preserved this speech as a literary style.

The influence of Italian has even led to the development of a separate language, Lunfardo, which blends Spanish and Italian. Argentine intellectuals have produced Lunfardo dictionaries and books in an effort to keep the language alive."

Lunfardo, as it happens, is the slang most often found in tango lyrics. It's associated with the slums. It draws heavily, sometimes literally, on Neapolitan Italian. A few examples:

To eat in Spanish: comer; in Italian: mangiare; in Lunfardo: manyar.
To speak in Spanish: hablar; in Italian: parlare; in Lunfardo: parlar.

I guess this explains why, when I've slipped a few times, drawing on years of French, and said "parlo" instead of "hablo," people here have looked rather startled. Ah, let them imagine the worst.