Language

The only national official language of Argentina is Spanish (which the Argentines call Castellano or Castilian). However, English, Italian, German and French are also spoken.

A few immigrants and indigenous communities have retained their original languages. For example, Patagonia has several Welsh-speaking communities, and there are a number of German-speakers scattered around the country. Italian, English and French are also spoken, and other languages such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Russian are easily found in Buenos Aires. Aymara is spoken by members of the Bolivian community who migrated to Argentina from remote rural areas in Bolivia. There are more than 1,000,000 speakers of Levantine Arabic and 1,500,000 Italian speakers.

Argentines are the only large Spanish-speaking society that universally employs what is known as voseo (the use of the pronoun vos instead of tú (you), which occasions the use of alternate verb forms as well). The most prevalent dialect is Rioplatense, whose speakers are primarily located in the basin of the Río de la Plata.

A phonetic study conducted by the Laboratory for Sensory Investigations of CONICET and the University of Toronto showed that the accent of the inhabitants of Buenos Aires (known as Porteños) is closer to the Neapolitan dialect of Italian than any other spoken language. The Italian immigration had a profound influence on Lunfardo, the famous slang spoken in Buenos Aires and elsewhere in the Río de la Plata region, permeating the vernacular vocabulary of other regions as well.