Rioplatense Spanish

Rioplatense Spanish is the dialect of Spanish spoken across most of Argentina and Uruguay, taking its name from the Rio de la Plata basin around which its major cities, Buenos Aires, Rosario and Montevideo, are concentrated. It is one of the most recognizable dialects in the Spanish-speaking world, marked above all by voseo, the everyday use of vos instead of tu for informal address, and by sheismo and zheismo, the merger of ll and y into a single fricative sound rarely heard elsewhere in the Hispanophone world. Massive Italian immigration between the 1870s and the mid-1960s left a further imprint on the dialect's vocabulary and its distinctive, almost sing-song intonation, which listeners across Latin America readily recognize as porteno or rioplatense.