Cocoliche is an Italian

Italian language

Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

-Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 pidgin

Pidgin

A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the...

 that was spoken by Italian immigrants in Argentina

Argentina

Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

 (especially in Greater Buenos Aires) between 1880-1950.

History

Between 1880 and 1900, Argentina and Uruguay received a large number of Italian immigrants, mostly poor country folk who arrived with little or no schooling in the Spanish language. As those immigrants strove to communicate with the local criollos, they produced a variable mixture of Spanish with Italian and Italian dialects, which was given the derogatory name cocoliche by the locals.

Italian proper never took hold in Argentina, especially because most immigrants used their local dialect

Dialect

The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...

s, and were not proficient in the standard language. This prevented the development of an Italian-language culture. Since the children of the immigrants grew up speaking Spanish at school, work, and military service, Cocoliche remained confined mostly to the first generation immigrants, and slowly fell out of use. The pidgin was depicted humorously in literary works and in the Argentine sainete

Sainete

A sainete was a popular Spanish comic opera piece, a one-act dramatic vignette, with music. It was often placed at the end of entertainments, or between other types of performance. It was vernacular in style, and used scenes of low life. Active from the 18th to 20th centuries, it superseded the...

 theater, e.g. by Dario Vittori

Dario Vittori

Darío Víttori was an Italian born, Argentine comic actor. His real name was Melito Darío Spartaco Margozzi and was born on 14 September 1921 in Montecelio, Lazio, Italy...

.

Influence

Some Cocoliche words were transferred to lunfardo

Lunfardo

Lunfardo is a dialect originated and developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the lower classes in Buenos Aires and the surrounding Gran Buenos Aires, and from there spread to other cities nearby, such as Rosario and Montevideo, cities with similar socio-cultural situations...

. For example:

• manyar (to eat) from mangiare -> in Lunfardo: to eat
• lonyipietro (fool)
• fungi (mushroom) -> in Lunfardo: hat
• vento (wind) -> in Lunfardo: money

See also

• Adoniran Barbosa
  Adoniran Barbosa
  Adoniran Barbosa, artistic name of João Rubinato , was a famous Brazilian traditional samba singer and composer.-Early years:...
  
  , composer in the analogous Italian-Portuguese
  Portuguese language
  Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
  
   pidgin.
• Italian settlement in Argentina