There has been considerable British influence on the development of Argentina, with contract workers and immigrants settling down and flourishing in the spheres of commerce, agriculture, and cattle breeding.

Those traces are still noticeable today: bilingual schools preparing students for British exams, Anglican churches, cricket, lawn tennis, and polo played at such places as the Hurlingham and Jockey Clubs. Many British people brought over in the first half of the last century stayed on when their contracts expired, joining other earlier settlers in establishing a substantial English-speaking community which, until the 1970s, preserved its language and culture. 

However, there are now signs that the English they speak is irrevocably beginning to disintegrate. Few “Anglo-Argentines” under the age of 30 are now truly proficient in English by comparison with the 1930s and 1940s, and today the “bilingual” school considers itself lucky to have students who speak English at home.

It is in the area of vocabulary that one most notices local variation. Any attempted etymology is invariably hazardous; nevertheless, we might distinguish the following categories.

1. Local usage, holdovers
   • “Put the milk in the ice chest” (some people still use the old word for “fridge” from the pre-electrical age)
   • “John’s just arrived from the camp” (campo, farm/place in the country)
   • “The station’s about five squares from here” (streets/blocks — Argentine towns are built on a regular grid system while usually in Britain the streets are irregularly spaced)
2. False friends
   • We had to wait at the barrier (Sp. barrera = level-crossing)
   • “Don’t inch” (Sp. hinchar = to bother, harass)
   • “Can you pinch me one of those little sausages?” (Sp. pinchar = spike/impale)
3. Double language: these are often unconsciously done and increasingly common
   • Take all that basura out of the pileta and put it in the patio (Sp. basura = rubbish, pileta = sink)
   • “I thought it wouldn’t alcanzar and yet it sobrared” (Sp. alcanzar = suffice, sobrar = be left over)

Pepperings are quite inevitable and ubiquitous, with frequent use of such Spanish fillers as bueno, che, este, o sea, and a tendency to end questions with a rising tag ¿no? to solicit agreement.

4. Interference from Spanish: these are insidious and impossible to avoid completely
   • “He lives in front of the cinema” (i.e. opposite)
   • “She’s going to a birthday (for ‘birthday party’)” (Sp. un cumpleaños)
   • In answer to the question “How are you?”, either “More or less,” or “Well” (Sp. Más o menos, Bien)

It is very hard to separate the “Spanglish” of the non-native speaker from the native English of the Anglo-Argentine. This is particularly noticeable in prepositional usage, as in sentences showing transfer from Spanish such as “He’s being operated next week.” (i.e. He’s being operated on next week) or “He got down from the bus.” (i.e. He got off the bus). These are just as common in both learners of English and many native-English-speaking Anglo-Argentines, not to mention more than the odd expat.

Another problem for Anglo-Argentines is that although speaking in English, it is usually known that the person to whom one is speaking also understands Spanish. We have to distinguish between on the one hand an Anglo-Argentine who says “I thought it wouldn’t alcanzar and yet it sobrared,” and on the other a child who is learning English at a bilingual school and says “It salirme the botón” (*it come off me the button = my button’s come off). Both assume familiarity with Spanish, even if the first phrase is more English in structure.

The phrase “I thought it wouldn’t alcanzar” in the previous paragraph is indicative of another issue, one familiar to translators. There is an English word ‘suffice’ with the same meaning, but it is too formal, the wrong register. But the speaker has already started with “I thought it wouldn’t…” and cannot now repair it in English. Not to break the flow, and knowing the interlocutor understands Spanish so they continue in that language. Of course, a native English speaker not exposed to the influence of Spanish would have started differently, with the more natural “I didn’t think there was going to be enough…”

These are subtle issues, and because of the difficulty in distinguishing between native and non-native deviation from “Standard English” it is hard to devise a methodology to establish any standard syntactic characteristics of “Argentine English.” In the long run, it is probably a doomed variety, but it is still very much observable amongst older members of the Anglo-Argentine Community.

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