Grammarama Spanish Classes
Articles on Spanish

Over the 13 years that I have been teaching Spanish as a second language, I have always made a point to instruct my Elementary Level students, at the very beginning of the course, about the pronunciation of the letters of the alphabet. I therefore cannot omit mentioning that, in the Río de la Plata region (La Plata River), letters `ll´ and ´y´ are pronounced in a particular way. These pronunciation patterns are notably different from international Spanish phonetics.

These differences can be better appreciated in writing by making a brief comparative analysis of the English and Spanish languages: the pronunciation of the English letter ´s´ in the word ´measure´ is very similar to the sound of the letters ´ll´ and ´y´ in words such as ´llueve´ (it rains) and ´ayer´ (yesterday) --as they are pronounced in the Río de la Plata.

The Río de la Plata linguistic modality includes Buenos Aires city, the vast extent of the province with the same name, the Patagonia area –which is inhabited by migrants arriving from the large metropolis and therefore is connected cultural and linguistically with it— and the main seaside towns of Uruguay. These urban centers have been closely related to the city where Jorge Luis Borges was born and Carlos Gardel chose to live.

It is a fallacy to say throughout Argentine territory the letters ´ll´ and ´y´ are pronounced as previously stated. Argentina also has three additional linguistic modalities: Litoral, Cuyo, and Northwest, whose phonetic features will be described and published in this section soon.

In conclusion, I would like to inform or to remind readers that Carlos Gardel –tango musician, singer, and composer— was one of the first public figures who dared to record tango lyrics using the Río de la Plata phonetics back in the 1920´s. ´Dare for more´ would be the most appropriate epithet to sum up the great artist's ´leitmotiv´ (by the way, this is the name of my friend Mónica Simonato´s first literary work) as at that time using this type of pronunciation was associated with being uneducated and not very refined.

Argentine Republic

The linguistic modality of the Río de la Plata (La Plata River) includes the large part of the following geographic regions: Pampas and Patagonia.