SOON ITALIAN WILL OVERCOME SPANISH IN ARGENTINA!!!!!
There are 21 Spanish speaking countries in the world but not one Italian speaking country outside of Italy. So what is the country outside of Italy that is most like Italy and close to an Italian speaking country? Argentina naturalmente. Argentina has more people of Italian origin than anyother country in the world outside of Italy. Argentina has close to 20 million people of Italian origin. 3/4 of the people from Buenos Aires, Argentina are of Italian origin.
People from Argentina speak Spanish with an Italian accent!!
Ask any native speaker of Spanish and they will tell you that
people from Argentina speak Spanish with an Italian accent.
(I taught high school Spanish for 30 years and have taken over
18 classes of Spanish, lived in Mexico and have gone to many
of the 21 Spanish speaking countries.)(Lived in Italy for 2 years molto tempo fa and went back il anno passato to school in la universita di Perugia)(Am currently in my 4th year of Italian classes here in California, a proposito)
Found this on the internet.
The Argentine accent evinces heavy Italian influence from the large influx of Italian immigrants. Hand gestures derived from Italian are extremely common, and many slang expressions are borrowed from Italian (for example: instead of saying "cerveza", which means beer, argentineans say "birra", which is in italian). Most locals can readily understand most Spanish dialects, and Portuguese or Italian if spoken slowly.
The Italian influence is one of the charms of travel in Argentina, instantly recognizable in the lilting singsong of Argentine Spanish and the use of Italian words like ciao (pronounced "chow"), often used in place of adios. Argentine red wine consumption is among the highest in the world. And pasta is an Argentine staple; it's available at almost any restaurant, and there's even a day of the month (the 29th, just before paycheck time) reserved for gnocchi. Curiously, a ñoqui now refers to a "ghost employee" of the government who only shows up on payday. Spanish is the official language of Argentina spoken almost everywhere. But there are still some small immigrant communities that retain their native language as a badge of identity. Italian is frequently used in some neighborhoods, reflecting the influence of Argentina's single largest immigrant group . In fact, it's not hard to confuse an Argentine with an Italian, as their manner of
speaking is quite similar.
Today in Argentina Italian-language television is almost as prevalent as Spanish TV.
Buenos Aires, Argentina Spanish 1
In this paper we present experimental evidence showing that Buenos Aires Spanish differs from other Spanish varieties in the realization of pre-nuclear pitch accents and in the final fall in broad focus declarative utterances. Whereas other Spanish varieties have been described consistently as showing late peak alignments, Buenos Aires Spanish displays early peak alignments. The alignment pattern found in Buenos Aires broad focus declarative utterances is not totally foreign to Spanish: it is attested in a quite different function, i.e. to signal contrastive focus. In addition, Buenos Aires Spanish also seems to differ from other Spanish varieties in the realization of the intonation contour in utterance-final intonational phrases, where a pronounced tendency for down-stepped peaks is observed. We argue that these patterns, which emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, and coincided with the peak of Italian immigration, are due to a combination of direct and indirect transfer from Italian. (75% of the people in Buenos Aires, Argentina are of Italian origin.)
As a result, two intonational systems that were typologically similar before contact took place (Hualde, 2002) became more similar after contact, in what can be interpreted as a case of convergence.
A proposito, Brazil actually has more people of Italian origin than Argentina but the difference is Argentina has a much higher percentage of people with an Italian origin.
http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?tsn=1&nav=messages&webtag=ab-italian&tid=7921