Español para vivir en Argentina

Argentines say vos for the informal "you". The Spanish academies record it as accepted at every social level, spoken and written. Only two verb forms change: the present, where the stress moves to the end, and commands. Other tenses stay as you learned them, and so do te and tu.

For "you" to more than one person, Argentines say ustedes, to friends and strangers alike, as everywhere in the Americas. Vosotros, the informal plural of most of Spain, is not used. To one person you do not know, usted is the polite form.

Most Spanish speakers say ll and y alike. In Argentina and Uruguay that sound is made with strong friction, as a "zh" or a "sh": this is sheísmo. Among younger people in Buenos Aires the "sh" has taken over, so calle (street) sounds like "ka-sheh" and yo (I) like "sho".

As across Latin America, z, and c before e or i, sound like s. Central and northern Spain say a "th" there, so cerveza (beer) has no "th" in Buenos Aires. If you learned the Spanish of Spain, this and the "sh" are the two sounds to retune.

At the end of a syllable, s is often breathed out like an English h, or dropped, so mismo (same) can sound like "mihmo" and más (more) like "mah". It is commoner in casual speech; careful speakers tend to keep the s.

Buenos Aires has an intonation of its own: the pitch peaks early and statements tend to step down at the end. Linguists trace it to the turn of the twentieth century, when Italian immigration was at its height, and the Instituto Cervantes describes it as shaped by Italian.

Where Spain often uses the perfect for what happened today, Argentines use the simple past. Studies of River Plate speech find the perfect rare, and kept mostly for "have you ever". Both are understood; the simple past sounds local.

The everyday future is ir a and a verb. In one study of educated speech it made up nearly two thirds of future forms in Buenos Aires, against under half in Madrid. The simple future, será, there more often means a guess: "it must be".

Small words carry a lot. che calls someone's attention, ¿viste? ("you know?") checks they are with you, acá is preferred to aquí, and re makes a word stronger: re lindo, really nice. Recién with a verb means "just now", as in most of the Americas but not in Spain.