Vos, and the verbs that come with it

The pronunciation of Argentine Spanish is a short list you can learn in an afternoon. The grammar has one genuinely large feature that no Spanish course sold in the northern hemisphere will have prepared you for, and it is unavoidable because it is how everybody speaks.

The informal you is vos, and it brings its own conjugation. Where a textbook gives tú tienes, tú quieres, tú eres, tú hablas, Argentina says vos tenés, vos querés, vos sos, vos hablás. The pattern is simple once you see it: take the infinitive, drop the r, add an s, and put the stress on the final syllable — poder becomes podés, venir becomes venís. The commands work the same way: vení, mirá, tomá, andá, dale. Textbook tú forms are understood perfectly and will simply mark you as foreign; understanding vos when it comes back at you is not optional.

Plural is always ustedes, as in the rest of Latin America, so the Spanish vosotros endings can be forgotten entirely — one less conjugation, in exchange for the one above.

Then there is lunfardo. Buenos Aires grew a slang out of the immigrant tenements and the tango halls, and unlike most slang it never quite went away: laburo for work, from the Italian lavoro; mina for a woman; guita for money; morfar for eating; quilombo for chaos or a shambles, which you will hear daily. Part of it is built by simply reversing the syllables of a word — tango becomes gotán, café becomes feca, amigo becomes gomía. You do not need to produce a word of it. Knowing it exists stops you assuming your Spanish has failed when a perfectly ordinary sentence turns out to contain a word from nowhere.

One warning that matters more here than almost anywhere. The verb coger, which in Spain is the everyday word for to take or catch, is obscene in Argentina. You tomás a taxi and agarrás a bag. It is the fastest way for Spain-learned Spanish to stop a table dead.

Spanish with an Italian tune

The first thing visitors say about Argentine Spanish is that it sounds Italian, and they are hearing something real. Between roughly 1870 and 1930 Argentina took in millions of immigrants and the largest share by far came from Italy; by the 1914 census about half the population of Buenos Aires had been born abroad. What survived is not the vocabulary so much as the music — a rising, swooping intonation across the phrase, and a habit of stretching the stressed syllable that no other Spanish-speaking country has. It comes with the hands, too. If a conversation on a Buenos Aires pavement looks like an argument and is not, that is the same inheritance.

Practically, this means two adjustments. Give the stressed syllable more length than you think it needs and let the pitch move on it — flat, evenly-clipped Spanish is what marks a foreigner here more than any single consonant. And commit to the sh. Half-saying it is worse than not saying it: calle is KAH-sheh and llave is SHAH-beh, and once your ear stops flinching at it you will find you understand twice as much of what is said back.

Six things that will catch you out here

You cannot pay a bus fare with money. City buses, the subte and most provincial transport take a rechargeable SUBE card and nothing else — no coins, no notes, no card tap in most places. Buy one at a kiosk or a station, load it with more than you think you need, and tell the driver where you are going before you tap, because the fare is distance-based.

Learn three words before you order steak. Argentine beef is cooked further than most visitors expect: the default is closer to well done, and asking for it a punto gets you medium at best. If you want pink, say jugoso; if you want it seriously rare, vuelta y vuelta, and be prepared to have the request gently questioned. Note also that a bife de chorizo is a sirloin and contains no sausage whatsoever.

The cubierto on your bill is not a scam. Most sit-down restaurants add a small per-person cover charge for bread, table service and the place setting. It is printed on the menu, it is legal, it is universal, and arguing about it marks you instantly. It is also not the tip, which is separate and given in cash.

Coffee has its own vocabulary and its own timing. A cortado is espresso cut with a little milk; a lágrima — a tear — is the reverse, warm milk with a drop of coffee in it; a café con leche is a breakfast drink. Order any of them with medialunas, the small sweet crescents that come de manteca (buttery, glazed) or de grasa (plainer, saltier), and you have had the national breakfast. Nobody will hurry you out of the chair afterwards.

Ice cream is a serious national institution. Heladerías — many of them Italian-descended family businesses generations old — sell by weight, stay open past midnight, and deliver to your door. A cuarto, a quarter kilo, is the standard order and comes with two or three flavours packed into one tub. Dulce de leche comes in several competing versions and choosing between them is a legitimate topic of conversation.

The kiosco solves most small problems. On practically every corner there is a kiosco or a maxikiosco, open late and often around the clock, selling drinks, snacks, transport top-ups, phone credit and painkillers. In a country where opening hours are otherwise late and generous rather than long, it is the thing that is always open.

A country assembled from somewhere else

Argentina is a nation of the descendants of people who arrived by ship, and that fact explains most of what a visitor notices. Italian and Spanish immigration dominated, but there are Welsh-speaking towns in Chubut founded in 1865, German and Swiss-founded settlements down the spine of the country, one of the largest Jewish communities in the Americas in Buenos Aires, and a large Arabic-speaking community with Syrian and Lebanese roots. In the northeast, Guaraní is co-official with Spanish in the province of Corrientes; in the northwest, Quechua words are ordinary speech. The Spanish is the glue, and it carries the fingerprints of all of it.

On English: Argentina consistently scores at or near the top of Latin America in English proficiency, and in professional Buenos Aires you will meet plenty of people who speak it well. Do not over-read that number. It is a city statistic and a young-professional statistic. In a ferretería, a bus terminal, a provincial hotel or the queue at a bank, you are speaking Spanish or you are miming.

And the country is enormous — nearly 3,700 kilometres from the subtropical north to Ushuaia, the whole of it in one time zone. A domestic flight can be five hours. What that means for the language is that the Spanish you meet in Salta and the Spanish you meet in Buenos Aires are more different than a traveller expects, and the section below is worth reading before you assume you have understood the accent.

Vos with almost everyone, usted with a few

Because vos is the informal, Argentina can feel startlingly familiar to someone arriving from Mexico. Shop staff, waiters, taxi drivers and strangers your own age will use it with you within a sentence or two, and returning it is correct rather than presumptuous. Usted is still right with the visibly elderly, with police and officials, in a bank or a consulate, and in a first approach to anyone you want to show deference to — but it is a smaller island here than it is anywhere else in the Spanish-speaking world, and staying on it too long reads as cold rather than respectful.

Che is the hinge of the whole register. It is not a word with a meaning so much as a way of turning towards someone — hey, listen, mate, all of them and none — and it is so characteristic that other Latin Americans use it as the nickname for an Argentine. Ernesto Guevara collected the name from Cuban colleagues for exactly that reason.

The second signature word is riskier. Boludo literally insults someone's intelligence and, between friends, has been worn smooth into something between mate and idiot, used affectionately in almost every sentence of a relaxed conversation. From a stranger, in traffic, or in any exchange that is already tense, it is a real insult. Listen for it as much as you like; do not deploy it in week one.

The everyday grease of Argentine conversation is a handful of words that carry no information at all: dale for yes, fine, go ahead, see you; listo for done, sorted; bárbaro and buenísimo for great; dos minutos for any period between two minutes and an hour. Using dale correctly once will get you a look of genuine approval.

Buenos Aires is not the whole country

The Spanish in this kit is rioplatense — the Spanish of Buenos Aires, Montevideo and the river between them. It is what the country's television, film and music are made in, it is understood everywhere in Argentina, and it is the accent most travellers arrive into. It is also, in national terms, one accent among several.

Córdoba has the most recognisable of the others: the tonada cordobesa stretches the syllable before the stressed one, producing a lilt that Argentines can imitate instantly and love to. The northwest — Salta, Jujuy, Tucumán — is slower, softer, marked by centuries of contact with Quechua, and largely does not use the Buenos Aires sh at all. The northeast around Corrientes and Misiones carries Guaraní vocabulary and a distinct rhythm. Mendoza and the west sit closer to Chile in both vocabulary and intonation, and Patagonia is a mix of everywhere, because everyone there came from somewhere else within living memory.

The vocabulary is where Argentina departs from the rest of the language, and the fruit and vegetable aisle is the fastest place to notice. A strawberry is a frutilla, not a fresa. An avocado is a palta. An apricot is a damasco. A peach is a durazno. Popcorn is pochoclo, a t-shirt is a remera, a city bus is a colectivo or a bondi, the Buenos Aires underground is the subte, and a ballpoint pen is a birome — after László Bíró, the Hungarian who patented it and then spent the rest of his life in Argentina.

None of this will get you misunderstood. Every word in this kit works from Ushuaia to La Quiaca. It is worth knowing only so that when the answer comes back with a different tune on it, you know you are hearing a region rather than a mistake.

Argentina, in sixty small pieces

Everything the card at the top of Start draws from — one a day, and here is the whole file. Read it on the plane.

• Fingerprinting became a working system in La Plata, where Juan Vucetich devised a way to classify prints in the 1890s, and Argentina was the first country to adopt it for identifying people.
• Malbec is the black grape of Cahors in southwest France, but it was the high desert vineyards of Mendoza that made it a great wine and Argentina's signature red.
• Luis Leloir won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for working out how the body converts sugars, research done in a modest Buenos Aires laboratory funded largely by private donations.
• Tener fiaca describes the particular heaviness that makes getting off the sofa impossible; it came from the Italian fiacca and has no tidy English equivalent.
• The mara, a long-legged rodent that looks like a hare crossed with a small deer, lives only in Argentina, bounds across the scrub at speed and keeps the same mate for life.
• Boludo began as an insult and now works as a term of affection between friends; tone does all the work, and misjudging it is the classic visitor's mistake.
• The crimped edge of an empanada, the repulgue, is not decoration: each folding pattern signals what is inside, so beef and chicken never get confused on a shared plate.
• Che is the all-purpose word for hey or mate, dropped into almost any sentence; a young Ernesto Guevara used it so constantly abroad that it became his nickname.
• Chimichurri is not a marinade but a raw sauce of parsley, garlic, oregano, chilli flakes, vinegar and oil, spooned over meat at the table, and no two households agree on the proportions.
• The letters ll and y are pronounced like the sh in shoe, so pollo sounds like posho and calle like cashe, giving an Argentine away anywhere in the Spanish-speaking world.
• The Abierto Argentino, polo's biggest tournament, is played each spring at Palermo in Buenos Aires, and Argentine players and ponies are hired by teams all over the world.
• When the rain sets in, the traditional response is torta frita: rounds of dough with a hole punched in the middle, fried in fat and dusted with sugar.
• Buenos Aires opened the southern hemisphere's first underground railway in 1913, and the wooden carriages of its Line A stayed in daily service for a full century.
• The Cerro de los Siete Colores above Purmamarca genuinely shows seven bands of colour, each one a different mineral laid down over millions of years.
• Mate is drunk in a circle from a single gourd: one person, the cebador, fills it, passes it round and refills it for each drinker in turn. Saying gracias means you have had enough.
• Nahuel Huapi, the lake beside Bariloche, means island of the jaguar in Mapudungun: nahuel is the jaguar and huapi the island sitting in the middle of it.
• Punta Tombo in Chubut holds one of the great colonies of Magellanic penguins, tens of thousands of birds nesting in burrows dug under the dry scrub.
• Buenos Aires means good airs, shortened from Nuestra Señora del Buen Ayre, a Sardinian shrine to the Virgin that Mediterranean sailors prayed to for a favourable wind.
• Carlos Gardel's recordings from the 1920s and 1930s remain the benchmark for tango singing, and his admirers like to say he sings better every day.
• Provoleta is a thick disc of provolone laid straight on the grill until it crusts underneath and runs in the middle, then scattered with oregano and chilli; the dish was invented here, not in Italy.
• The Orcadas station in the South Orkney Islands has been staffed by Argentina every single year since 1904, making it the longest continuously operating base in Antarctica.
• Laguna del Carbón, a salt depression in Santa Cruz province, lies roughly 105 metres below sea level, the lowest point on land in the southern hemisphere.
• The colectivo, the city bus, was born in Buenos Aires in 1928 when taxi drivers began running fixed routes and splitting the fare between passengers.
• Fileteado is the curling, shadowed lettering that decorates carts, shopfronts and buses in Buenos Aires, painted freehand with ribbons and flourishes, and it joined UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2015.
• Mendoza closes its grape harvest with the Vendimia, a week of blessing the fruit, parades and a night show in a hillside amphitheatre where the harvest queen is crowned.
• An asado is cooked slowly over wood embers rather than a rushed flame, and the person tending the fire is the asador, a job that carries real household prestige.
• Fugazzeta is a Buenos Aires pizza with no tomato at all, two layers of dough packed with mozzarella and buried under sweet onion, descended from the Genoese fugassa the city's bakers brought with them.
• In 1865 a shipload of Welsh settlers landed in Chubut to found a colony where they could keep their language; Welsh is still spoken there and Gaiman still serves Welsh tea.
• Mufa is bad luck treated as a substance: a person can carry it, an object can hold it, and a friend who brings it will be told to touch wood before saying another word.
• Dinner starts late, with restaurants filling up around ten at night, so inviting someone to eat at eight will earn you a puzzled look.
• Milanesa a la napolitana, a breaded cutlet topped with ham, tomato and melted cheese, is said to have been invented at a Buenos Aires restaurant called Napoli rather than in Naples.
• A gauchada is a favour done freely and without fuss, the kind a stranger does for you on the road; the word comes straight from the gaucho and English has no single equivalent.
• The hornero, the national bird, builds a thick clay nest shaped like an old bread oven, a horno, and never reuses one, so a single fence post can end up carrying several.
• Dulce de leche, milk and sugar stirred for hours until it turns to caramel, is the default filling for almost everything sweet, from pancakes to birthday cakes to breakfast toast.
• Yerba mate resisted planting for generations until Jesuit missionaries in the northeast worked out how to germinate the seeds, and the plantations of Misiones grew from that.
• Ushuaia, on Tierra del Fuego, calls itself the city at the end of the world; the island was named for the fires the Yamana kept burning, visible from passing ships.
• Medialunas come two ways: de manteca, glossy with butter and sweet syrup, and de grasa, made with lard, smaller and barely sweet at all.
• On the 29th of every month people eat ñoquis and slip a banknote under the plate for luck, a custom that began with Italian families stretching the last coins before payday.
• The cordobés accent, known as the tonada, stretches the syllable just before the stress into a singsong lilt, and other Argentines can place a speaker from Córdoba within about three words.
• Boca Juniors play at La Bombonera, the chocolate box, named for its steep three-sided bowl; fans insist the ground does not tremble, it beats.
• Some of the oldest dinosaurs known, Eoraptor and Herrerasaurus, came out of the red badlands of Ischigualasto in San Juan, a valley nicknamed the Valle de la Luna.
• Storing blood for transfusion became practical after Luis Agote used sodium citrate to stop it clotting, at a Buenos Aires hospital in 1914.
• Bakery pastries are called facturas and carry names like bolas de fraile, friar's balls, and vigilantes; the story goes that anarchist bakers in the 1880s chose them to needle the powerful.
• Fernet, an Italian bitter, found its real home here: the only Fernet-Branca plant outside Italy stands in Buenos Aires province, and the standard order in Córdoba is fernet con coca, roughly one part bitter to three of cola over ice.
• Tango grew out of the immigrant neighbourhoods and dockside bars of Buenos Aires, and is still danced socially at milongas that run from midnight until well past dawn.
• Aconcagua, in Mendoza province, reaches close to 6,960 metres and is the highest mountain anywhere outside Asia.
• An alfajor is two soft biscuits glued together with dulce de leche and coated in chocolate or meringue; the name reached Spanish from the Arabic al-hasu, meaning the filling.
• La Plata was drawn on paper before it was built in 1882: a perfect square grid crossed by diagonals, with a plaza every six blocks and a park at the exact centre.
• Locro, a thick stew of hominy corn, beans, pumpkin and meat, is what kitchens fill with steam on the patriotic holidays of 25 May and 9 July.
• The ballpoint pen was perfected and patented in Buenos Aires by the Hungarian-born inventor Laszlo Biro, which is why any biro here is still called a birome.
• Torrontés is the white grape Argentina can claim as its own: it smells of jasmine and peach yet finishes dry, and the vineyards around Cafayate in Salta sit above 1,600 metres.
• Lunfardo, the slang that grew in the tenements and docks of Buenos Aires, borrowed heavily from Italian, and its vocabulary fills the lyrics of tango.
• In the Bosques Petrificados of Santa Cruz, araucaria trunks up to thirty metres long lie where volcanic ash buried them some 150 million years ago, every growth ring now turned to stone.
• The Zonda is a hot, dry wind that pours down the eastern side of the Andes into Cuyo, arriving so parched that locals blame it for headaches and short tempers.
• Salinas Grandes, the salt flat spread across Jujuy and Salta at around 3,400 metres, is worked by hand, with cutters opening shallow pools in the crust so the brine dries back to salt in the sun.
• El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires sells books from the stalls, boxes and stage of a theatre built in 1919, with the original painted ceiling still overhead.
• Pato, the national sport, is played on horseback: two teams of riders wrestle over a leather ball fitted with six handles and try to throw it through a vertical hoop.
• Cuarteto, the bouncing tunta-tunta dance music of Córdoba, grew up in the 1940s around piano, accordion and violin, and still fills dance halls across the province every weekend.
• English took the word pampas straight from Quechua, in which pampa simply means a flat, treeless plain.