Lunfardo

Lunfardo is an argot originated and developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the lower classes in the Río de la Plata region and from there spread to other urban areas nearby, such as the Greater Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and Rosario.
Lunfardo originated from the mixture of languages and dialects produced due to the massive European immigration, mainly Italian and Spanish, which arrived in the ports of the region since the end of the 19th century. It was originally a slang used by criminals and soon by other people of the lower and lower-middle classes. Later, many of its words and phrases were introduced in the vernacular and disseminated in the Spanish of Argentina, and Uruguay. Nevertheless, since the early 20th century, Lunfardo has spread among all social strata and classes by habitual use or because it was common in the lyrics of tango.
Today, the meaning of the term lunfardo has been extended to designate any slang or jargon used in Buenos Aires.

Etymology

Most sources believe that Lunfardo originated among criminals, and later became more commonly used by other classes. Circa 1870, the word lunfardo itself was often used to mean.

Origin

Lunfardo began as prison slang in the late 19th century so guards would not understand prisoners. However, the vernacular Spanish of mid-19th century Buenos Aires as preserved in the dialogue of Esteban Echeverría's short story The Slaughter Yard is already a prototype of Lunfardo.

Lunfardo today

Today, many Lunfardo terms have entered the language spoken all over Argentina and Uruguay, although a great number of Lunfardo words have fallen into disuse or have been modified in the era of suburbanization. Furthermore, the term "Lunfardo" has become synonymous with "speech of Buenos Aires" or "Porteño", mainly of the inhabitants of the City of Buenos Aires, as well as its surrounding areas, Greater Buenos Aires. The Montevideo speech has almost as much "Lunfardo slang" as the Buenos Aires speech. Conde says that Lunfardo can be considered a kind of Italian dialect mixed with Spanish words, specifically the one spoken in Montevideo. In other words, Lunfardo is an interlanguage variety of the Italian dialects spoken by immigrants in the areas of Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
In Argentina, any neologism that reached a minimum level of acceptance is considered, by default, a Lunfardo term. The original slang has been immortalized in numerous tango lyrics.
Conde takes the view that the Lunfardo is not so much a dialect but a kind of local language of the Italian immigrants, mixed with Spanish and some French words. He believes that Lunfardo is not a criminal slang, since most Lunfardo words are not related to crime.
According to Conde, Lunfardo

Characteristics

Lunfardo words are inserted in the normal flow of Rioplatense Spanish sentences, but grammar and pronunciation do not change. Thus, an average Spanish-speaking person reading tango lyrics will need, at most, the translation of a discrete set of words.
Tango lyrics use Lunfardo sparsely, but some songs employ Lunfardo heavily. "Milonga Lunfarda" by Edmundo Rivero is an instructive and entertaining primer on Lunfardo usage.
A characteristic of Lunfardo is its use of word play, notably vesre, reversing the syllables, similar to English back slang, French verlan, Serbo-Croatian Šatrovački or Greek Podaná. Thus, tango becomes gotán and café becomes feca.
Lunfardo employs metaphors such as bobo for the heart, who "works all day long without being paid" or bufoso for pistol.
Finally, there are words that are derived from others in Spanish, such as the verb abarajar, which means to stop a situation or a person and is related to the verb "barajar", which means to cut or shuffle a deck of cards.

Examples

Nouns

buchón – "snitch", informer to the law
chochamu – "young man"
facha – "face", and by extension "appearance", "looks"
fato – "affair", "business"
fiaca – "laziness", or lazy person
gamba – "leg". Also "100 pesos".
gomías – "friends"
guita – "money", "dole"
laburo- "work", "labour"
lorca – "heat", as in hot weather
luca – "1,000 pesos"
mango – "peso"
mina – "chick", "broad"
naso – "nose"
palo – "1,000,000 pesos"
palo/s verde/s – "dollars"
percanta – a young woman
pibe – "kid", a common term for boy or, in more recent times, for young man. It comes from Italian word "pivello".
quilombo – "racket", "ruckus", "mess"; also slang for "brothel".
urso – a heavyset guy. It comes from the Portuguese urso or the Italian orso.
yorugua – "Uruguayan",.
Verbs
cerebrar – "to think something up"
engrupir – "to fool someone"
garpar – "to pay with money"
junar – "to look closely", "to check out"/ "to know"
laburar – "to work"
manyar – "to eat"/ "to know"
morfar – "to eat"
pescar – "to understand", "to get a grip" associated to the Spanish verb pescar
Interjections
che – appellative to introduce a conversational intervention or to call out, translatable as "hey!", "listen to me!", "so", "as I was telling you!" and other ways of addressing someone. The expression identifies Argentines to other Spanish speakers, thus Ernesto "Che" Guevara for the Cubans.
¡guarda! – "look out!", "be careful!"
Modern slang

Since the 1970s, it is a matter of debate whether newer additions to the slang of Buenos Aires qualify as lunfardo. Traditionalists argue that lunfardo must have a link to the argot of the old underworld, to tango lyrics, or to racetrack slang. Others maintain that the colloquial language of Buenos Aires is lunfardo by definition.
Some examples of modern talk:

gomas – "tits", woman's breasts
maza – "superb"
curtir – "to deal with it", "to dig", "to be knowledgeable about", "to be involved in". Also "to fuck".
curtir fierros can mean both "to be into car mechanics" or "to be into firearms". Fierro is the Old Spanish form of hierro. In Argentine parlance, fierro can mean a firearm or anything related to metals and mechanics
zafar – "to scrape out of", "to get off the hook", "to barely get by", etc. Zafar is a standard Spanish verb that had fallen out of use and was restored to everyday Buenos Aires speech in the 1970s by students, with the meaning of "barely passing ".
trucho – "counterfeit", "fake"; trucho is from old Spanish slang truchamán, which in turn derives from the Arabic turjeman. Folk etymology derives this word from trucha, or from the Italian trucco – something made fake on purpose.

Many new terms had spread from specific areas of the dynamic Buenos Aires cultural scene: invented by screenwriters, used around the arts-and-crafts fair in Plaza Francia, culled from the vocabulary of psychoanalysis.

Influence from Cocoliche

Lunfardo was influenced by Cocoliche, a pidgin of Italian immigrants. Many Cocoliche words were transferred to Lunfardo in the first half of the 20th century. For example:

lonyipietro – "fool"
fungi – "mushroom" → in Lunfardo: "hat"
vento – "wind" → in Lunfardo: "money"
matina – "morning"
mina – "girl"
laburar – "to work"
minga – "nothing!"
yeta – "bad luck"
yira/yira – "to walk around ", "to ramble aimlessly", etc.. Usually "yiro" or "yira" is used to refer to a prostitute.
¡salute! – "cheers!"
eccole – "exactly"

Some Italian linguists, because of the Cocoliche influences, argue that the Lunfardo can be considered a pidgin of the Italian language.

Affixes

A rarer feature of Porteño speech that can make it completely unintelligible is the random addition of suffixes with no particular meaning, usually making common words sound reminiscent of Italian surnames, for no particular reason, but playful language. These endings include -etti, -elli ''eli, -oni, -eni, -anga, -ango, -enga, -engue, -engo, -ingui, -ongo, -usi, -ula, -usa, -eta, among others. Examples: milanesa milanga, cuaderno cuadernelli, etc.
On the other hand, the addition of prefixes are semantically transparent and contextually limited to the expressive re-'', "very".

General and cited references

Conde, Oscar. Lunfardo: Un estudio sobre el habla popular de los argentinos. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Taurus..