What is different about Spanish in Argentina compared to the rest of South America or even Latin America?
When it comes to the different Spanish-speaking countries, the majority of the differences are with the accent [how their Spanish sounds] and their dialect and lexicon [how the language is used and what words they use].
In that way, you can sort of consider the differences the same with how English is different from the US and Canada, even though we’re technically neighbors. And even cities and states in the US have their own differences in accent and dialect. That’s more or less how it works for Argentina and the other South American countries (the Spanish-speaking ones, specifically).
Argentina is primarily known for it’s use of the voseo which is the use of vos for “you” which has eclipsed tú “you (informal)” and Usted “you (formal)”. Though voseo didn’t originate in Argentina, it’s used differently than how it was in Spain.
The pronoun vos was used to be polite or respectful, and it conjugated the way vosotros does now in Spain. The vos was “you” for formal situations, or when speaking to people who deserved respect. The term Vuestra Merced “Your Worship/Grace” gradually became Usted in Spain, which Vuestras Mercedes becoming Ustedes.
The vosotros is made up of vos + otros “you all” or literally “you others” which is plural. Spain no longer uses singular vos except in historical settings.
Today in Spain, vosotros is “you all (informal)” which is the plural of tú (2nd person informal), while Ustedes is “you all (formal)” the plural of Usted (2nd person formal).
Latin American countries don’t typically use vosotros anymore, except in the older works or occasionally fairy tales or things set in the Medieval period/Renaissance because that’s what Spanish was like then.
In a way, I consider it sort of like English “you” which originally was formal and our informal “you” was “thou”… but no one uses “thou” or “thee” unless we’re trying to sound Shakespearean. It works like that.
Latin America may use vos [the usage of vos is called voseo], but it differs from country to country in application, if it’s used at all.
For example, I said Argentina uses vos indiscriminately. In Chile, which is right next to Argentina, the use of vos is something that only the younger generation do and it’s considered a bit vulgar or at least street talk, not to be said in polite company.
The conjugation is different too; Spain’s vosotros would use podéis and Argentina’s vos would be podés which just means that Spain’s is a little bit more fully pronounced; the rest of Spanish would typically say tú puedes.
While vosotros has its own conjugations for all tenses, voseo only has its own conjugations for present tense, present subjunctive, and typically affirmative commands but sometimes negative commands depending on the region [like no vengas is tú or vos, but sometimes you’ll see no vengás which is only vos but it’s a variation]
In all other tenses and moods, vos conjugates like tú as in… vos/tú fuiste or something like that.
Chile’s conjugation of voseo is a bit off, they typically end it with an -i, not an -s. So you can hear ¿Cachai? for “Got it?” / “Understand?” where if the verb is cachar you would assume it would be cachás
Argentina is also pretty well-known for pronouncing the LL sound as a SH/ZH sound [the sound you make when shushing people] while most of Spanish pronounces it with more of a I/Y or long Y sound; like me llamo is typically pronounced something similar to “me yamo” but in Argentina it sounds closer to “me shamo”.
As far as everything else goes, the word choices are so varied it’s unbelievable.
You can usually tell where a Spanish-speaker is from by knowing what their words for “car”, “bus”, “tire”, “to work”, “guy/dude”, “girl/chick”, “to fuck”, “okay”, “to drive”, and “to walk”.
The accents are also different but I find them more easily understood by history. Argentina’s porteño accent [Buenos Aires] sounds very distinctly Italian-ish to me, but other accents are very distinct. Cuba’s accent is very similar to Canarian Spanish [Canary Islands] because there was a high number of people that came to Cuba from the Canary Islands.
Most of the time, the main accents people are known for tend to be related to the capital city, like Mexico DF’s accent, the Bogotá accent, Caracas, Buenos Aires/porteño…
That’s pretty common with most countries, Spain’s madrileño accent is for Madrid. It also works like that for other non Spanish-speaking countries, like Japanese for Tokyo, or French in Paris, or English in London are very distinct from the other areas.
I think the US might be the biggest exception to the rule since Washington DC’s accent is more like a Mid-Atlantic accent that’s spoken in other states too, but maybe a slight Southern twang here and there, but not really. But we do have regional accents like Boston, New York, Virginia, Southern, Western, West Coast, Texan… and so on.
The accents can vary depending on cities in Spanish-speaking countries, as does word usage and that’s especially true for cities on the border between other countries, or really big countries like Mexico which have more regional accents.
And with dialects, you also sometimes get loanwords or codeswitching between indigenous languages or border languages; like portuñol is a mix of Portuguese and Spanish that’s common for countries bordering Brazil. Some countries have a mix of indigenous words like Nahuatl (Mexico) or Quechua (Peru). There are regions of South America that have Plautdietsch which is a variation of German spread by Mennonites. African languages also show up in some places.
And occasionally the accent is affected by social class, which was much much more common in the times of the Spanish Empire when the upper class sounded much more European than the middle or lower classes. It’s sort of the same with English that sounds “posh”.
This video goes over a lot of different accents though it’s not the same for everyone 100% of the time but I still really like it
