El habla rioplatense: Algunos elementos italianizantes como caracterizadores

During approximately 400 years the geographical situation of Spanish in the Rio de la Plata region (central-eastern/southern Argentina and Uruguay) placed the dialect at a disadvantage with respect to the development of Modern Castilian. The isolation and lack of educational institutions lasted well into the nineteenth century, so that the popular speech remained arcaic and unstable.;With respect to the implosive -s, the feature that sets apart standard middle and high educational level "rioplatense" from the rest of the asigmatic hispanic dialects is a consistent, clear sibilance in absolute final position, with aspirated interior preconsonantal /s/. Contrastingly, popular "rioplatense" shows a rather systematic elision, with realization of phonic O for word final -s in all positions, even intervocalic. Preconsonantal word-interior sibilants frequently appear simultaneously with the word-final elision. The interrelation of these phenomena must be traced in extraphonological forces. Since the position of implosive /s/ in the popular speech coincides frequently with that of Italian, we believe that it is an italianizing feature.;The Spanish/Italian contact is documented in cocoliche, the speech of first-generation inmigrants trying to communicate in Spanish. There we can observe some of the ways the elision of word-final -s could have penetrated the popular "rioplatense".;Finally, from the many lexical borrowings established in lunfardo we conclude that Italian has left important traces in the popular speech of the region, contributing to its characteristic flavor.;By the mid-1800s, Italians constituted a majority of the first contingents of European immigrants. From the beginning, the local Spanish became permeable to influences of the immigrant dialects. A consequence of this adstratum situation is the existence of some italianizing phonetical and lexical features among the characterizing elements of modern urban "rioplatense", such as the particular distribution of the allophones of implosive -s and the many lexical italianisms that abound in the lunfardo argot. Both phenomena reflect sociolinguistic forces.