The lyrics are composed based on a local slang called lunfardo and often express sorrows, especially “in matters of love.”
While tango can be sung with varying degrees of lunfardo presence in its lyrics, it is the essence of Rioplatense lunfardo, characterized by its pose and sound, that distinguishes it. Lunfardo is not only a jargon consisting of hundreds of unique words, but it is also, and perhaps more essentially, a linguistic stance, an exaggerated way of speaking (which includes dropping “s” sounds), by which Argentinians and Uruguayans, inhabitants of the coasts of the Río de la Plata, are recognized worldwide. Tango is “criminal” because lunfardo “is criminal,” meaning it is a musical style built upon popular speech; lunfardo is the speech of the suburb, the voice of the outskirts.
Nowhere else does lunfardo express the migratory fusion that originated Rioplatense societies, as expressed by tango. Lunfardo originated in the 19th century mainly from Italian immigrants, who were the majority in both Buenos Aires and Montevideo, but it also contains other influences, including words from African, Aymara, Mapuche, Jewish, Gypsy-Spanish, Galician, Quechua, Arabic, Guarani, Polish, Portuguese, and English, which mix in everyday usage without consciousness of their origin.
Lunfardo originated as and continues to be today a hidden-metaphorical language constructed from a remarkable dynamic between the prison society, youth, and the world of work. In a way, as José Gobello said, lunfardo is “a lexical prank, something like a mischievous wink that speech gives to the language.”
At times, lunfardo was persecuted in the Río de la Plata and questioned by some scholars of the Royal Spanish Academy. In the 1930s and 1940s, there was a practice among intermediate officials to censor tangos containing lunfardo lyrics. For that reason, many, including “Mano a mano” and “Los mareados,” were rewritten. During the dictatorship of Onganía (1966-1970), lunfardo virtually disappeared from tango and popular music. In 1969, Alejandro Dolina included the term “bulín” in his song “Fantasmas de Belgrano,” and Horacio Ferrer began his famous “Balada para un loco” with an essentially lunfardo exclamation: “Ya sé que estoy piantao, piantao, piantao…” Since then, and despite some attempts during the dictatorship established in 1976 to “sanitize” popular culture, lunfardo has experienced a notable resurgence
In the early 21st century, lunfardo enjoys great vitality, having been adopted and reformulated by new generations. Some linguists, like the Italian Matteo Bartoli, asserted that the term “lunfardo” comes from the Lombard dialectal term “lumbardo” (meaning Lombard, inhabitant of Lombardy, a region in northern Italy). Over time, lunfardo assimilated “cocoliche” (which was heard in Buenos Aires less and less in the second half of the 20th century, probably due to the disappearance of immigrants from Southern Italy who spoke it). Many of the cocoliche words are now part of lunfardo.
Some lunfardo examples, especially taken from Italian and Lombard, are as follows:
- “Fiaca” (from “fiacca”: ‘weakness’ in Italian): laziness, lethargy;
- “Mufa” (‘mold’ in some dialect): annoyance and also bad luck;
- “Gamba” (‘leg’ in Italian): someone who helps or has good intentions, also ‘a hundred pesos’ because they “help”;
- “Gambetear”: to dodge (mainly in soccer);
- “Minga”: ‘nothing’ in Lombard dialect;
- “Yeta” (from Italian “iettatura”): bad luck;
- “Yira” or “yiro” (from ‘girar, dar vueltas’ in Italian): streetwalker;
- “Atenti” (‘attentive’ in Italian): attention;
- “Salute” (‘health’ in Italian);
- “Cuore” (‘heart’ in Italian), if someone says “te quiero de cuore” it means ‘I love you with all my heart.’
Moreover, terms like afano, boludo, bardo, bondi, cana, chabón, che, chorro, escabiar, junar, mina, morfi, pibe, rajar, rea, yuta, manyar, lastrar, pilcha constitute the Rioplatense speech, on both sides of the Plata River, in Uruguay as well as Buenos Aires (see map of the Río de la Plata) and in other parts of Argentina.
