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In skimming through TL´s Portuguese Blog I came across Christopher O’Donnell’s excellent article on the word “America” and the controversy it can spark when used incorrectly in a foreign language. This is an important point for our Spanish-speaking audience as well, and a problem I personally faced on my first study abroad experience in Mexico.
Talking one day with my host father, I referred to my home country as “América” His brow began to furrow, his face coloring, and asked “America? Mexico is America, too!” I quickly realized that I had fallen into an ethnocentric language trap. Despite what we in the US might think, for Spanish-speakers, “América” refers to the land mass of North and South America and encompasses all territory from the northern tip of Canada to the southern-most point of Patagonia. Likewise, all inhabitants of the land mass are referred to as “americanos”.
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Argentina is largely a country of immigrants and is distinguished from its Latin American neighbors by its mainly European ethnic roots: according to the CIA’s World Fact Book, 97% of Argentines consider themselves to be of European origin. The majority of immigrants to Argentina, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hailed from Spain and Italy, while Germans, Slavs, French and others also contributed in significant numbers. Buenos Aires served as a linguistic as well as ethnic mixing pot, leading to the creation of a distinctly Argentine form of slang, called lunfardo. Many lunfardo terms are adaptations of Italian or French words, others are simply unique creations, and still others employ a strategy of syllable reversal in which tango becomes gotán and café becomes feca. This slang is spoken primarily in Buenos Aires, and is featured heavily in some tango songs and certainly among the city’s hip population.
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