La lengua gauchesca en sus orí­genes

Abstract

The so called "gaucho" language lacks a precise definition. The main difficulty is due to the fact that its character as a differentiated language is so controversial as the meaning of the word "gaucho" itself, because the concept has referred to different social profiles, diversely evaluated along the history of the region of the River Plate in colonial and post-colonial times. This paper aims to prove that the gaucho language was a litterary construction, though effectively based on the language spoken in that region, gave birth to a new code formerly restricted to lexical items but enlarged thereafter by selected phonetic, morphological and syntactic features to become a standardized secondary dialect